Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Calling the music “polite plastic pop,” British critic Mike Evans was also unmoved by all the over-the-top attempts at entertaining. “The curtain went up on a tinseled shrine to American kitsch, a mini Las Vegas, all red lights and glitter,” he wrote. The songs were “flawlessly sung and expertly performed with hardly a trace of emotion in the whole performance.”

  Perhaps Karen and Richard were working too hard. The new show had been scripted by the Welch duo, and every word and gesture—even the ad libs—were written out and rehearsed to robotic perfection. “Theatrics Overshadow Carpenters’ Music” was the headline following a concert at Oklahoma University’s Homecoming. “They were not only tied down by a script, they were bound and gagged by it. . . . It is unfortunate that they got saddled with the Pollyanna image early in their careers and have decided to cater to it.”

  ON TOUR, both Karen and Richard kept to themselves. While the band members were sightseeing in various cities and bowling down hotel hallways, as they were known to do, the siblings were usually secluded in their own hotel rooms. “They were an odd pair,” recalls frequent opening act Denny Brooks. “I didn’t think they felt comfortable in their own skin. I loved the band, but Karen and Richard just weren’t the type of folks that I would really hang out with.”

  Roadie Michael Lansing, however, found himself quite taken with Karen and made it his mission to make her as comfortable on tour as possible. He brought in carpeting for her dressing room and always made sure her television reception was adequate, even if it meant running wires from the TV set to various metal objects around the space. “I saw her in every kind of conceivable fashion,” Lansing says, “from bra and panties in the dressing room to stage outfits ready to walk on.” He and roadies Jackie Hylen and Dave Connley would retrieve Karen’s huge wardrobe case, which she nicknamed Blackula, from her upstairs bedroom at Newville, slide it down the stairs, and load it into the brown Dodge van marked with the gold-lettered “Carpenters” logo. From there they would transport the wardrobe to the Carpenters’ Morsound warehouse in Studio City, where it was loaded into one of two semi trucks that followed the group from city to city.

  In Karen, Lansing sensed a depth of character he feels many others looked past. “I think she was misunderstood by so many people,” he says. “Karen was much more sensitive than she let on. She really enjoyed just being normal and was so down-to-earth. Talking to Karen was like talking to anybody else. She didn’t have airs about her. She was really a fun girl, but I think she wanted to have a lot more fun in life than she did.”

  To pass time on tour Karen would work on various needlepoint projects and watch videocassettes of her favorite television programs, such as I Love Lucy and Marcus Welby, M.D., while stylist Sandy Holland put her hair in rollers. Unlike many other singers, she spent very little time preparing her voice for concerts. “I’ve discussed this with a lot of singers,” she said in 1978. “They say, ‘How do you prepare for a show?’ I say, ‘I get dressed and walk downstairs. What do you do?’ ‘Oh, I do pushups, and I exercise my tonal thingies.’ I’m saying, ‘My Lord, you wear yourself out before you go on!’”

  As the Carpenters rescheduled European tour was underway in the fall of 1976, Agnes and Harold Carpenter joined the group in England for the Palladium engagement and enjoyed sightseeing during rehearsals and sound checks. “The mom ran the show,” recalls Denny Brooks. “I mean she ran the whole show. They had management and they had agents, but basically all the big decisions were made by Agnes when she was along. I liked Harold a lot. He enjoyed being along on the road. He was a very charming guy and a hoot to have around. In his distinctive slow drawl he would say, ‘Well, boys, where are we gonna hang the feed bag tonight?’ The parents didn’t have an itinerary. They just followed the yellow brick road and got on the planes with us and went wherever their kids went.”

  Also along on this tour was Richard’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, first cousin Mary Rudolph, daughter of Agnes’s sister Bernice. “I’d stayed at their family’s house in Baltimore when Mary was just a teenager,” recalls Maria Galeazzi, who lived next door to Mary’s older brother and Carpenters roadie Mark Rudolph. “Her brother and I were very close, and from what Mark said, Mary pursued Richard quite a bit. It was like nonstop.” Michael Lansing recalls that Mary joined the group as wardrobe and prop assistant and to the press was known as “Mary Pickford,” an effort to deter attention from the couple’s common roots. “We’d all go bowling or to the movies or just hang out. Mary was dating Richard at the time, but nobody said anything. Nobody ever said a word!”

  According to friends, Karen was “livid” and “furious” about her brother’s relationship with the girl she had only known as their kid cousin. She was especially upset by the amount of time Richard was spending with Mary on tour. “I never had a boyfriend on the road,” Karen had told Ray Coleman in 1975, avoiding mention of then boyfriend Terry Ellis. “Not only didn’t I agree with it, but I never met anybody I wanted to have on the road. It’s the same thing with the guys bringing wives or women on the road. We tend to think when you go out [on tour] you go to work.”

  While in England, Karen did her best to distance herself from Richard and Mary and found herself surreptitiously meeting with John “Softly” Adrian, head of press and promotion at A&M in London. Assigned by the label’s regional chief Derek Green, Softly was asked to personally assist the Carpenters for the duration of their London stay. “You’ll need to look after Karen when she gets here,” Green told him. The handsome, suave thirty-three-year-old former model, who acquired his nickname after appearing in a television series called Softly, Softly, was already a fan of the Carpenters. In what he explains as having been an attempt to familiarize himself with the Carpenters and their show, Softly had flown to Germany prior to the group’s arrival in London. “We always did that with our artists,” Softly recalls. “You couldn’t be working with them and not know who they were.”

  “Why are you sitting there all alone and being so snobby?” Karen’s flirtatious handwritten note became an invitation for Softly to join her for breakfast at the Albany Hotel in Glasgow. He smiled from across the room before joining her and recalls being surprised by Karen’s normality. Captivated by her sweet disposition, he made a silent vow that the two would become romantically involved. “The attraction was instant, and I would like to think it was mutual,” he says, “but we were kind of shy of each other a bit, to be honest.”

  Softly soon realized it would be more difficult to infiltrate the Carpenters’ circle than he imagined. “She was always surrounded by people—family managers and record executives,” he recalls. “She had several moats, and you were going to have to cross them to get anywhere near her. She was like a little girl to me, really. A little girl who happened to have an extraordinary voice. Karen was very kind and very sweet, but she lived in a glass bowl. She had sixty-five people telling her what to do and fifty-seven hangers-on and managers and submanagers, and it was like a bloody fiasco.”

  Softly admits his position with the record label was his only way past the moats. “I had to pick her up at the hotel and take her to interviews and look after her, so I was very close to her during that time. You get to know people rather quickly when you’re working that closely with them, and I think she trusted me to take care of her.” As he had hoped, a brief interlude of puppy love ensued, and he and Karen began to see more of one another as time allowed. “It was one of those short, very enjoyable, very lovely romances,” he says. “Hardly anybody knew about it, really. It was very sweet. That’s all, really. It was just very sweet.”

  Despite their affection for each other, concealing their feelings was imperative. No one would have approved of a relationship between a Carpenter and an A&M staff member. Despite their precautions, word of Karen’s involvement with Softly ultimately reached A&M executives and the Carpenters’ management. Frenda Leffler was along for this leg of the tour and became concerned about the intentions of this man who seemed to
have showed up out of nowhere. “What would you do with all that money?” she asked him.

  “I’m doing just fine without it now, actually,” he responded. “I could care less about her money.”

  Despite Softly’s claims of truly loving Karen, Frenda and others in the entourage saw him as a bit of a playboy and did not take him seriously. It was not until Karen invited him to join her in Los Angeles for Christmas that everyone became disturbed. In their opinions she was simply infatuated and not thinking this through. “It was a momentary thing, and Karen didn’t really see the reality of it,” Frenda recalls. “He showed her a lot of attention, and he was a cute guy, but it just wasn’t right for her. He was put out of commission rather quickly. The powers that be jumped on it, and Karen didn’t have anything to say about it.”

  Back at A&M headquarters in London, Derek Green was alerted of the budding romance between Karen and his employee. Softly’s character and intentions were being scrutinized, but Green assured those who questioned his character that he was indeed a fine man and anything but a gigolo. But after much urging, Green called Softly into his office, where he explained that if he were to go through with his plans to visit Karen in Los Angeles, he would no longer have a job at A&M. With the offer of plane tickets for a Caribbean vacation, Softly was told to go away, relax, and forget all about the fantasy of ever being with Karen Carpenter. “Basically our relationship was sabotaged by many of the people surrounding us,” Softly says. “It was nipped in the bud, and I was threatened with my job. I went off to the Caribbean and got married after three months. It was what you might call a rebound.”

  At the time, Softly figured this was most likely some sort of scheme by Karen to secretly end their impending relationship. It seemed too good to be true anyway. His pride was hurt, and he quietly disappeared from the final leg of the tour. When Karen learned he had left the tour for a tropical vacation, she was sure he had run off with some other woman. In the end, both were persuaded to believe that the other had lost interest, and the relationship came to an end. “They were a controlling bunch,” Softly says of A&M and the Carpenters in general. “She was the golden goose, and people protected her. They didn’t want anybody, particularly an outsider she might be fond of, to take her away from the family. I think it was that people got scared that I might become her manager or something, which was totally ridiculous. I was not qualified to do that anyway.”

  Upon her return to Los Angeles, Karen sent a handwritten greeting card to Softly saying, “Thanks for looking after me.” He doubts she ever learned how their relationship had been disrupted. In fact, the two never spoke of the fling again. Softly was only told of the conspiracy some fifteen years later when Derek Green broke his silence. Softly was upset to learn of the control Karen seemed to have been subjected to all those years ago. “She was a sad little girl, basically. She couldn’t seem to do anything for herself or make any decisions. Everything was done for her. She had her mom and dad and brother and managers, and she was lost in this whole thing.”

  WITH NO serious romantic interests in sight, Karen enjoyed a few sporadic dates with musician friend Tom Bähler and several entertainers including Barry Manilow, actor Mark Harmon, and comedian Steve Martin. “Steve really liked Karen, and of course she thought he was an absolute scream,” says Evelyn Wallace. “They were going out, and Karen had picked out what she was going to wear. Then word got around to Richard that Karen was going to go out that night with the Steve Martin. It wasn’t long before he got in touch with Karen and said, ‘Oh, I just got the studio, so we’re going to be recording tonight.’ Knowing that Karen had a date, he somehow all of a sudden got the studio and they were going to go up and record. See, even when she was on her own and living in the condo, Richard had a string on her. She was never ever her own boss.”

  Like the celebrities she dated casually, Karen found it extremely difficult in her situation not only to meet people but to find somebody “real,” as she would often say. “I want desperately to find the right man,” she said in 1976, “but it really has to be someone who is understanding and extremely strong. The average guy could never live under the pressure and all the other absurdities that go along with being in the limelight. You can’t force these things. When you do, it always turns into a nightmare. I know a lot of people who have, and they always ended up the loser. I’ll go on doing what I’m doing, and if I meet someone who turns me on, we’ll go from there. . . . I’m not afraid of being an old maid. The idea doesn’t scare me a bit. Happiness shouldn’t be contingent on another human being. We’ve been programmed for so long that your value goes down if you don’t end up with a husband or a wife. That’s a sickness that has sprouted many unhappy people.”

  As former manager Sherwin Bash explained, it’s extremely difficult for a successful female artist to find a man who can deal with her celebrity status. “I don’t know anyone who wants to be Mr. Diana Ross,” he said. “Do you want to be Mr. Barbra Streisand? I don’t think our male egos work that way, so to find that person is not that easy.”

  Karen shared with friends her desire for life as a wife and mother. “You see, I so much want to start a family,” she told an interviewer in 1976. “I really want kids. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I could not have children without first being married. I believe in the institution of marriage very strongly. I’m family oriented and I’m proud of it. I had a happy childhood, and I would like to do the kind of job my parents did.”

  Carole Curb affirms that having children seemed to be her ultimate goal in life. “Even though she had an amazing voice and was very driven, I think ultimately she just wanted to have a husband and kids and the white picket fence.” Childhood friend Debbie Cuticello agrees. “She wanted children desperately. She wanted a family, the little white picket fence, the dog, and the two-car garage.”

  Until that time came, Karen lived vicariously through best friend Frenda Leffler, even climbing atop Frenda’s hospital gurney on her way into the delivery room. Unbeknownst to everyone, Frenda was carrying twins. With the arrival of the second baby, Karen looked up toward the ceiling and exclaimed, “Thank you God! You sent one for me!” She settled for the title of godmother to babies Ashley and Andrew—the “kidlets” she would call them—and Ashley soon acquired the nickname Ashley Famous. She presented each with a silver dish that she had hand engraved with the message: WHEN I COUNT MY BLESSINGS I COUNT YOU TWICE. LOVE, AUNTIE KAREN.

  In anticipation of starting her own family, Karen mulled over names for her future children. It was decided that a son would be named for Richard but that everyone would call him Rick or Richie. For a daughter she chose the name Kristi.

  11

  JUST LET US KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS!

  FROM “(THEY Long to Be) Close to You” in 1970 through “I Need to Be in Love” in 1976, every Carpenters single (not including B-sides) reached #1 or #2 on the Adult Contemporary chart, “a streak that nobody has come close to beating,” according to Christopher Feldman’s Billboard Book of #2 Singles. On the pop charts the duo racked up a string of sixteen consecutive Top 20 hit singles and five Top 10 albums. They won three Grammy Awards in these six years and were presented with an American Music Award. But these amazing feats would do little to soothe the pains of the decline in record sales and popularity the Carpenters would experience in the latter half of the decade. The slope—particularly steep at home in the United States—was most upsetting to Karen, who seemed to take each success or failure personally. “Each time you get a hit record you have to work twice as hard to get another one,” she said in 1977. “This business changes every minute. If you don’t spend all your time staying on top of it or thinking you’re staying on top of it, you’re going to be gone. And that’s a full-time job.”

  Though Karen and Richard were still very well known, and their concerts were a huge draw, record sales began to fall. A Kind of Hush eventually went gold but was not the commercial success of previous Carpenters albums. Herb Alpert had hinted t
o Karen and Richard that the album was not on par with their earlier releases. Although Alpert could have held up production in favor of better material, the Carpenters were satisfied enough and pushed for its release.

  Allyn Ferguson, who worked with the Carpenters in the early 1970s, witnessed the downhill slide of many artists, even legends like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. “It happens to everybody,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the people themselves. They’re doing the same thing they always did. The public gets tired of them. It’s a strange thing how the American public is not only fickle, but they respond to a lot of different things that are not musical at all, like the publicity and the attention that everybody’s giving them. It’s like a mob mentality. When the idol starts to have the image disappear, American fans just move on to the next one. That’s a part of show business. We have a great term in showbiz—everybody’s a ‘star fucker,’ which means if you’re not a star anymore everybody just turns their back. It’s very fleeting, and there are tragedies. I think Karen was one of those tragedies, and I could name dozens of other people who can’t deal with the fact that it’s not like it used to be.”