Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  As for Karen, the far-flung future (“at least five years from ‘now’”) holds possibilities of singing and acting in a musical comedy. “I’ve always loved Broadway-type musicals like Camelot, Finian’s Rainbow and The King and I. I’d like to do something like that, eventually.” With her vibrant beauty, her electric stage appeal and her voice—which definitely blends pure sweetness with a hunt of sophisticated sultriness—this seems like another dream that could well be gloriously realized. For the Carpenters, dreams seem to turn to reality with the snap of their magical fingers.

  Karen loved female comedians like Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller, and even more dramatic actresses like Barbra Streisand, who had seen much success with musicals like Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly! “Streisand just floors me,” she said in 1976, just two months prior to the release of Streisand’s A Star Is Born. “She’s so good. I would like to do something like that.”

  The natural comedian in Karen was evident to all who knew her. “She was really droll,” says Carole Curb. “She made everybody laugh with this amazingly witty and sarcastic sense of humor.” According to Frenda Franklin, “Karen did the best Barbra Streisand imitation you’ve ever heard in your life. She really, really could have been an actress. She wanted to act. She even wanted to study acting. Today it seems as though everybody wants to do everything in the business, but in those days if you sang, you sang. You were lucky that you got the opportunity to sing. But Karen wasn’t looking at it like, ‘Oh, I want to be a movie star.’ She just knew that she had something else to offer.”

  IN THE fall of 1956 during a visit to the Music Corner, one of New Haven’s popular record shops, Harold Carpenter had purchased Spike Jones’s Xmas Spectacular album for his children. It was an odd and varied mix of trademark Spike Jones novelty songs and serious choral music arranged by Jud Conlon. A progressive vocal arranger at the time, Conlon came onto the scene in the 1940s and is often credited with pioneering the tight, close harmony sounds used in popular music at the time. He and his “Rhythmaires” backed Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and others on a number of popular recordings.

  “There was one album that I remember from the day I was born,” Karen said. “It was Spike Jones’s Christmas album. There are some zany things on there. . . . Spike Jones was a master at zany stuff. A lot of people don’t know that it takes more talent and more perfection to pull off crackpot things than it does to do a lot of serious things. . . . This album was a combination of nutty and serious. We grew up with that album and just loved it to death.”

  Since signing with A&M Records in 1969, Karen and Richard had wanted to record a Christmas album of their own. They both loved the Christmas season and the abundance of great holiday music, but due to touring and recording schedules they had only been able to fit in two seasonal offerings over the years, “Merry Christmas, Darling” in 1970 and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” in 1974. In preparation for The Carpenters at Christmas, their second special for ABC-TV, recording sessions commenced in August 1977. It was quickly decided that these recordings would serve as the foundation for an entire album of Christmas music to be released in conjunction with the television special’s airing.

  The early Spike Jones recordings proved to be the inspiration for Richard, who admittedly patterned much of this project after the Xmas Spectacular LP both he and Karen had enjoyed so much as children. They immediately set out to hire Jud Conlon to do their arrangements, only to find that he’d died in 1966. Their next call went to Peter Knight. It was Knight, along with veteran arranger Billy May, who helped bring the concept to life with the help of an eighty-piece orchestra and seventy-voice choir. A five-minute overture of nine selections was orchestrated with the strings, making way for the grand entrance by Karen’s voice.

  Frosted window panes, candles gleaming inside

  Painted candy canes on the tree

  Santa’s on his way, he’s filled his sleigh with things

  Things for you and for me

  Sammy Cahn’s festive lyric for “The Christmas Waltz” was the perfect match for Karen’s warm delivery, which melted into a creative rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” Lesser-known titles like “It’s Christmas Time,” “Sleep Well, Little Children,” and “The First Snowfall” were culled from the Spike Jones album. Arranger Billy May, who had previously lent his talents to the Carpenters’ Horizon in 1975, was responsible for helping re-create the Spike Jones charts in a way best suited to Karen’s vocal range. This included the pairing of songs like “Winter Wonderland” and “Silver Bells” in an unforgettable medley with “White Christmas.”

  It became obvious that there was not time to complete and release the album prior to the airing of the 1977 television special. As a consolation, A&M released “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” as a special holiday single that year. Karen’s is one of the only performances of the tune that truly rivals the warmth and presence of Nat “King” Cole’s classic recording. In the same vein were “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” two songs so identified with Judy Garland and Bing Crosby, respectively. Surrounded with the choral and orchestral sounds of a glorious 1940s MGM musical, Karen was as natural and at home with these songs as either a Judy or a Bing. The songs took on new ownership in the capable, worthy hands of Karen Carpenter.

  Recording continued off and on between other sessions, tours, and television tapings, and the Carpenters spent a total of fourteen months producing what became Christmas Portrait. Midway through the process they took their Christmas selections to the Las Vegas stage at the MGM Grand, complete with a huge tree and nearly eighty musicians. Their usual Vegas orchestra was augmented with a twenty-four-voice choir.

  Construction of the album continued in the New Year. “Merry Christmas, Darling” was by then a recurrent holiday favorite on the radio, but Karen was never pleased with the huskier sound from the lead vocal recorded when she was only twenty years old. Her voice had matured and developed immensely, so she opted to re-record “Darling” in 1978, as she had done with “Ticket to Ride” in 1973. The Carpenters also took time to record several nonfestive songs amid the Christmas sessions, including “When I Fall in Love” and “Little Girl Blue” for their 1978 ABC-TV special The Carpenters—Space Encounters. The tunes were so similar in style that only the latter was included. “When I Fall in Love” was later included in their 1980 special, Music, Music, Music.

  The sacred selections intermingled with the secular on Christmas Portrait included “Christ Is Born,” a lovely musical setting Richard first heard on The Perry Como Christmas Album in 1968, the traditional carol “Silent Night,” and the vocally demanding Bach-Gounod version of “Ave Maria.” Karen’s love for the Christmas season and its music was always evident when asked about the album, which was planned for a double LP set at one point. “To sing these songs is something that gives me more pleasure than I can really put into words,” she said. “I think we came out with something like twenty-nine songs. We’ve got at least another twelve in the can that we couldn’t finish. . . . We were dying because we couldn’t stuff them on the record. We’d have had to leave the label off!”

  In contrast with A Kind of Hush and Passage, reviews for Christmas Portrait were overwhelmingly positive. “They’ve synthesized everything to ever come out of Sunset Boulevard at Yuletide into two sides of a perfect piece of plastic,” wrote James Parade of Record Mirror. “[I]t will bring you Disney, Snow White and her snow, whiteness whiter than white, sleighbells . . . shimmering strings, snowflakes scurrying, ring-ting-tingling, jingling and lots more besides. . . . Buy this record for instant atmosphere and have yourself a merry little Christmas.”

  Christmas music was the ideal showcase for Karen Carpenter, and in many ways her renditions were the perfect union of songs and singer. “Christmas Portrait is really Karen’s first solo album, and it should have been released as such,” explained Richard in 2004. “But I don’t believe A&M would have b
een too keen on that, especially since no conventional album had been released by us that year.”

  12

  THE BIRD HAS FINALLY FLOWN THE COOP

  AGNES CARPENTER was a worrier. She had trouble getting to sleep each night and had sought the help of a doctor in the early 1970s. “When she’d go to bed, she’d think about what she had to do or things that had been done that shouldn’t have been done,” explains Evelyn Wallace. “She’d always have something on her mind. She couldn’t get to sleep, so they had to give her something strong.”

  Agnes first noticed Richard’s state of exhaustion and inability to sleep in the fall of 1971 after the group returned home from their European tour. He was worried about completing their next album, A Song for You, in the allotted time. “I was up just about every night,” he recalled in 1988. “I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I did not look too hot when I stepped off the plane. I’d never had a pill before or since except for this. I was really in need of some sleep and quite nervous and concerned.”

  Quaaludes were prescription sedatives commonly used to treat insomnia at the time, and Richard did not hesitate when his mother offered them to help him sleep. “Taken properly they were a very good pill,” he later explained. “She took them until they discontinued them—one a night the way you’re supposed to. She never had any problem with them.”

  For a number of years, Richard took the quaaludes as directed. “It was very difficult to sleep on the road,” recalls Maria Galeazzi, who began taking quaaludes with Richard during their romance. “I just sort of bummed off of him. It wasn’t every night. It was now and then when he couldn’t sleep.”

  According to Evelyn Wallace, “If Richard didn’t go to sleep the minute he hit the pillow, he’d get up, and he’d end up fooling around at the piano or get something to eat in the kitchen. Those wear off after a while if you keep busy enough. He’d go up to bed, but he still wasn’t sleepy. He’d take another one and sometimes a third one. He was just taking too darn many of them.” Richard found that he enjoyed the high the quaaludes gave him—a convenient but risky side effect of sorts—but he was never much of a party animal. For some time he knew nothing about the use of quaaludes as a recreational drug, but the more he took, the longer it would take for the drug’s effects to wear off.

  Gradually Richard became more and more severely addicted. As his condition worsened his playing began to suffer, and he lost all confidence in his abilities as a pianist. By late 1978 the addiction had taken hold. Disguising the problem became more difficult for Richard because his speech was slurred, and he could barely sign his name because he was unable to hold a pen in his trembling hands. This meant that playing certain intricate piano parts was out of the question. “One side of me was saying, ‘You fool! You’re killing yourself, you can’t function and you’re letting your sister and parents down,’” he wrote a decade later in TV Guide. “But the other side convinced me I couldn’t get by without those pills. . . . I tried a couple of detox programs, but even if you get the stuff out of your system, it’s hard to lick the problem. By 1978 I was in trouble, no two ways about it.”

  Richard hit rock bottom in September when they played the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He spent most days in bed or dealing with anxiety issues and panic attacks. He would emerge early in the evenings, just long enough to do the show. All he could think about was getting off the stage and going back to bed, where the vicious cycle continued. It was between performances on Monday, September 4, that Richard abruptly informed the band and their crew that he was quitting. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m not playing another night.” Although it was never Richard’s intention, this run at the MGM Grand would prove to be the Carpenters’ last professional engagement, save a few public appearances in 1981. Even then, the band reunited only to mime their instrument playing while Karen and Richard lip-synched to their studio recordings.

  Los Angeles session singer Walt Harrah, who was brought in to fill in for band member Dan Woodhams after a serious automobile accident, was disappointed to see his stint with the Carpenters end prematurely. “I did their last MGM show where Richard just quit,” he recalls. “It was a two-week engagement of something like twenty-eight shows, and he quit after four or five days. I guess he was sick of it. He was very private. He was very aloof and alone and kind of depressed, but so was Karen. It could have had to do with her physical condition. She looked like a Holocaust victim.”

  With Richard dealing with his addiction and the aftershocks felt from his swift termination of the group’s Vegas gig, the last thing he wanted to do was prepare for another appearance. Yet the Carpenters were on the bill for a concert with Frank Pooler, his choir, and the university orchestra. The show was to be held December 3, 1978, in the Pacific Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center with proceeds benefitting the Carpenters Choral Scholarship Fund at California State University Long Beach. As the date approached, Richard began removing songs from the program when he realized he was unable to perform them. “My hands were shaking too much,” he explained some years later. “I told Karen I was dropping ‘It’s Christmas Time’ because I didn’t think it would go over well. And I told her I was dropping ‘The Nutcracker’ because I didn’t think the university orchestra could cut it. I pared that damn program down to almost nothing because I couldn’t play most of it. Poor Karen. She was buying all of this, even though she knew I had a problem.”

  The Carpenters took the stage late in the show that Sunday afternoon with guest conductor Doug Strawn leading the choir and orchestra. Karen’s entrance on “Sleep Well, Little Children” was uneventful, and Richard was incapacitated. He did manage to fulfill his promised rendition of themes from Close Encounters of a Third Kind and Star Wars, a medley somewhat out of place in the context of a Christmas performance.

  “The Carpenters finally arrived on the stage far too late in the show to make much difference, and stayed for too short a time,” wrote Charles Carney in his review for the 49er, a student newspaper. “Their presence should either have been established during the early portion of the show and woven throughout, or extended for a longer time at the end. As it was, their arrival broke the carefully designed momentum that had been building during the first two-thirds of the show and catapulted it into the predictability of a Las Vegas lounge act.” The Carpenters’ lackluster appearance in Long Beach was saved only by Karen’s rich and warm tones on “Merry Christmas, Darling” and “Silent Night” and a performance of “Ave Maria” rivaling that of the album version.

  During the following week, Karen and Richard were scheduled to depart for London, where they were set to appear on Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night on BBC rival ITV. Richard was in no condition to perform, much less travel overseas. He was practically bedridden and tried to convince Karen that these promotional appearances in London could wait, even though two new albums, The Singles 1974–1978 and Christmas Portrait, had just hit the UK market. “We’re going!” she told Richard, determined to follow through with the engagement.

  Arriving at the group’s rehearsal space in North Hollywood, Karen was met by the band members but not Richard. She called him immediately and discovered he was still in bed and refusing to make the trip. When she visited him later that day, Richard explained how his addiction had gone too far. Although she was aware of his condition, he had always made excuses and she’d usually believed him. “You get pretty devious,” he later recalled. “The same way anorexics do. But it finally got so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed, and I had to say, ‘Karen, I’ve got a problem here.’”

  Due to her tenacious spirit—or perhaps just out of sheer stubbornness—Karen flew to London with the band to make good on their promise to perform. Covering for Richard, she told Bruce Forsyth’s audience that he was under the weather. “Two days before we were going to come over, he caught himself a real nice case of the flu,” she said through a nervous smile. “So he’s flat on his back in Los Angeles, and he’s really upset that he couldn’t come.”r />
  Musically, the show went off without a hitch, thanks to the support of friend Peter Knight and Jeff Wesley, the latter filling in for Richard on keyboards. Taking liberties with the melody, Karen’s performance of “I Need to Be in Love” was perhaps the most tender and intimate reading of the song ever. She also performed “Please Mr. Postman,” “Merry Christmas, Darling,” and the ambitious grouping of “Winter Wonderland,” “Silver Bells,” and “White Christmas” as a duet with Forsyth.

  Word of a possible split between the Carpenters spread across Europe with the airing of the Forsyth show, but Karen did her best to dispel such rumors. “Karen wants everyone to know that she is not going solo,” Tim Ewbank wrote in the Sun, with Karen explaining that “Brucie’s show is setting a sort of unfortunate record for us. It is the first time that the Carpenters have been billed to appear anywhere without both of us going on.” Ewbank inquired about her health, to which she replied, “I’m fine now. I’ve got my energy back and I’m raring to go!”

  Indeed, this was one of the first occasions in her entire career that Karen had been away from home without Richard by her side. From her hotel suite at the Inn on the Park in central London, Karen sent her brother a postcard of encouragement, postmarked December 12, 1978: “It’s all coming off like clockwork—the album is getting hotter by the minute. The music end is tops. Miss you—Love, KAC1.” (Karen’s abbreviated signature referred to the personalized California license plate attached to her 1972 Mercedes 350.)