Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  While in London, Karen requested that John “Softly” Adrian assist her. Softly was by then a married man and maintained a safe distance from Karen. Their conversations consisted mostly of small talk. “You haven’t said ‘thank you’ for your wedding present, Softly,” Karen said playfully.

  “What present?” he asked.

  “The present I sent you,” she said. “I sent you a crystal punch bowl with glasses!”

  Softly was puzzled. The only contact he was aware of came in 1976 when Karen sent him a note saying “The bird has finally flown the coop”—this after her move from Downey to Century City.

  “Karen, I didn’t get any present from you,” he said.

  “Hmm,” Karen pondered. “Well, I gave it to someone at A&M. Obviously they didn’t send it to you.” The mystery surrounding the orchestrated ending of their relationship some two years earlier seemed to continue but without their knowledge. The two shared one last hug at London’s airport as Karen boarded a plane bound for home.

  SOARING RECORD sales in Europe did little to cheer Karen. The reality of her personal problems and those of her brother hit home once she returned to Los Angeles just in time for Christmas. A year earlier they were celebrating on stage in Las Vegas, but in 1978 the holidays were anything but happy in the Carpenter household. Heated arguments ensued with Richard becoming increasingly dismayed by Karen’s withering figure. “He was not all that kind to Karen,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “But at times he’d even argue with his mother, which was taking his life in his hands!” Karen would retort with comments about the consequences of his addiction. To Richard, these were not welcome observations from someone on a similar path of self-destruction. “She was so concerned,” Frenda Franklin explains. “You see, Karen was very sensible about everybody else. In the case of Richard, there was nothing to debate. It was terrible. She just couldn’t wait any longer to get him help. He wasn’t happy with her, but she took the strong role and did what she had to do as a sister.”

  Richard was called to a meeting at the office of Jerry Weintraub with Werner Wolfen and others present. “Before you know it, in the middle of the meeting Richard was sound asleep in the chair,” recalls Wallace. “They knew Richard was on something even then.”

  On the morning of January 10, 1979, Richard popped ten pills before boarding a plane bound for Topeka, Kansas. “Karen forced him,” Frenda says. “She took him on an air ambulance to Menninger’s.” There Richard checked into the chemical dependency unit with Karen and Wolfen at his side. Both Richard and Werner felt this would be a great opportunity for Karen to address her issues as well, but she was not serious enough about her eating disorder to do anything significant about it. Instead she returned to Los Angeles—full of nervous energy—and began looking for projects to occupy her time while Richard was in rehab. “It was OK for a little bit,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “but then I was anxious to go back to work.”

  During her first return visit to see Richard at Menninger, Karen hesitantly shared her plans to go into the studio to begin recording a solo album. Just two weeks into the six-week program, he was in no condition to hear this sort of news and was understandably livid. “He was madder than hell,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “He did not want her to go to New York and record on her own. I think that he realized that Karen could sell more records than he could.”

  By this time, Richard was certain Karen was battling the disorder brought to his family’s attention by Wallace three years earlier, and he confronted her about her own well-being and deteriorating physical appearance. “What the hell are you talking about? Going and doing a solo album?! Why don’t you go and check into something like this that is meant for anorexics!” He reminded Karen of their upcoming tenth anniversary in the music industry. “We can go into the eighties the same way we went into the seventies. We have our talent. We have our record contract.”

  Karen shut down. She adamantly denied her own issues. “No,” she insisted, “there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have anorexia nervosa; I have colitis.” In her diary entry for January 24, 1979, Karen wrote: “Confrontation about album.”

  In public, Karen refused to admit that her physical state was due to anything more than exhaustion from years of overwork. In private, however, Karen took her illness seriously enough to seek professional help—but not without Frenda Leffler by her side. “I had known for a while that she had some sort of a mental illness,” Frenda explains. “I knew it wasn’t just that she didn’t want to eat because she didn’t want to eat. She just couldn’t conquer this. We were somewhat aware of what it could be, but they just didn’t know how to treat it. We didn’t have a Menninger type of thing for her. If we had the great centers for eating disorders they have today, everything could have been different. “ With Karen’s blessing, Frenda had researched and made appointments with several Los Angeles–based psychiatrists, several of whom dealt with food issues. During each visit, Karen insisted Frenda remain with her while she met with the doctors. “Let me just go in the other room,” Frenda said, sensing one doctor’s exasperation during a consultation.

  “No, Frenny,” Karen exclaimed in a panic. “Take me, too!”

  “I’m just going to the outer office,” she said, assuring Karen she would be fine. “I’ll be right out there. You don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m going with you,” Karen said, jumping from the couch and heading for the door, leaving Frenda to apologize.

  Another cry for help went out to singer Cherry O’Neill when Karen phoned her for advice. “She didn’t sound panicked, but she felt that she really needed some help,” O’Neill says. “Karen was having particular problems with laxatives, and she didn’t believe she could ever get to a point where she was not dependent upon them.” O’Neill felt Karen needed a change of scenery. She understood the benefits of getting away from family and the obligations of work. “You need to get away from the pressures of L.A. and show business and concentrate on your own life and survival,” she said.

  “I’m going to do it,” Karen told her. “I’ll get well. It’s just so damn hard.” Evelyn Wallace entered the office during one of the calls in time to overhear Karen say, “Well, I don’t want to die.” Wallace quickly grabbed her things and exited once she realized the serious tone of Karen’s conversation.

  Cherry sent Karen a copy of a typewritten manuscript for her forthcoming book, which made its way to Ev’s desk. Starving for Attention was O’Neill’s autobiographical look at her battle with anorexia and her eventual recovery. “Whether Karen read the whole thing or not, I don’t know,” Wallace says. “I think she left it on my desk purposely. Otherwise she would have gotten rid of it or she would have hid it in some of her stuff. Why would she leave that on my desk? I think she wanted me to read it.”

  BY 1979 Karen’s voice had dominated the airwaves for nearly a decade alongside other great pop female vocalists, including Barbra Streisand, Anne Murray, Helen Reddy, and Olivia Newton-John. These singers maintained individual identities as solo artists, garnering a great deal of attention to their personal strengths and abilities, but the public identified Karen as part of a duo. Year after year she was overlooked when Grammy and American Music Awards nominations were announced in categories recognizing female vocalists. Although she rarely voiced disappointment, Karen had yet to receive accolades for her talents as an individual singer.

  Karen would mention from time to time that she would like to record a solo album and receive recognition as a solo artist. She had received numerous requests to guest on albums by other artists but always declined out of respect for Richard. In fact, just months earlier she had turned down an invitation from KISS member Gene Simmons, who asked her to sing on his self-titled solo album (which ultimately featured appearances by Helen Reddy and Donna Summer). But Karen had gradually reached a point in her career where she wanted to be known as Karen Carpenter, not just the lead singer from the Carpenters. “That is the ultimate compliment,” she had told Ray Col
eman back in 1975, “to have respect not only from your fans but also your peers and other singers. To have that kind of reputation and have it stay, it would be fantastic. And it’s really nice to know that other people think that something you have is that special.”

  There was no doubt in Frenda’s mind that Karen knew she was good. She was always confident in her talent and abilities. “I think she knew that she had an ability to really touch people,” she recalls. “I also think she wanted to do her own thing, and that was a big, big problem. She had talked about it for a long time. It wasn’t about hurting anybody. It was about exploring her talents.” Frenda encouraged Karen, seeing a solo project as a huge step toward the independence and autonomy Karen so desperately needed. “It was her Emancipation Proclamation,” she says. “There’s no question, it was her coming out party. That’s exactly what it was. But she had no idea the price she was going to pay.”

  Karen seemed optimistic about her musical options, despite Richard’s debilitated state. “Everybody is trying new things,” she said in a radio interview during her visit to England in December. “Needless to say, the disco thing is so hot right now. Even a lot of the disco things are pretty, you know. Donna Summer has done some beautiful songs.” She also expressed a love for the music of the Bee Gees, whose Saturday Night Fever album became one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time.

  When asked about future projects and the possibility of both she and Richard working separately, Karen spoke of her brother’s interest in scoring a film and hinted of a possible solo project for herself. “We have often thought about it,” she said in 1978. “We have discussed it—not necessarily interrupting the Carpenters as a unit but to add on to that. One of the things that Richard’s wanted to do for years is produce other people, and if he did something like that I might do a solo album or get into acting, but at the same time keep the Carpenters going because we don’t ever want to let that go. We’ve been discussing a lot of things. There’s so much to do, and it’s a lot of fun to keep changing.”

  To the Carpenter family, a solo venture for Karen threatened the Carpenters as a duo. This was especially difficult for Agnes Carpenter, who saw the idea as her daughter tampering with the established formula she had devised. She was fearful a temporary split might lead to a permanent separation and the end of her son’s career. “You have to remember, these were uneducated, unsophisticated people,” says Frenda of the senior Carpenters. “They were going to stay with the tried and the true. Agnes had washed those cars so that Richard could perform. That was her vision and her goal. That was it! And you stayed with the plan. Anything that deviated or threatened was bad. So Karen was bad.”

  Initially, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss supported the idea of a solo project for Karen, as did manager Jerry Weintraub. It was Alpert who recommended producer Phil Ramone, “the Quincy Jones of the East Coast,” according to Rob Hoerburger for Rolling Stone. Ramone’s career with such artists as Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon was thriving. His recent production of Joel’s 52nd Street album won the Grammy for Album of the Year for 1979. Karen was hopeful the producer would consent. Ramone, too, had a great deal of respect for Karen as a vocalist and was a self-professed fan of the hits she created with Richard earlier in the decade. “The greatness of her is that within five seconds of hearing that voice on the air you know it is Karen,” Ramone says. “Hers is still one of the most instantly identified sounds in the world.”

  Ramone first met the Carpenters in 1970 when working on an album with Burt Bacharach on the A&M lot. “Herb asked me to come in his office,” he recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to hear these two young people we signed recently.’ I went crazy. The next time that I heard about them, Burt said they had covered ‘Close to You.’ Fast-forward a little bit, Burt goes out on a tour and the opening act was the Carpenters. That’s when I saw them in New York at Westbury Music Fair.”

  Jerry Weintraub made the call to Ramone proposing he work with Karen and explained that Richard was taking a year off due to overwork and exhaustion. Phil agreed enthusiastically but was unaware of Richard’s bout with quaaludes and his stay at Menninger. “I knew nothing,” he says, although he sensed something might be going on beneath the surface. The call from Weintraub was followed by calls from both Alpert and Moss, with both men expressing their support but reminding Phil they were not looking to replace the Carpenters.

  Karen’s initial meeting with Ramone was a short and informal one that took place at the producer’s duplex on Burton Way in Beverly Hills. “Karen didn’t want anybody to know that she was even thinking about doing a solo album,” recalls Karen Ramone, then Karen Ichiuji and Phil’s girlfriend. “She was so hard on herself. She was basically hyperactive, and she really wanted to continue her music. She didn’t know whether or not Richard would come out of Menninger’s and say he wanted to work again. I think she was really trying to prepare herself for any scenario that might happen. She got all thumbs up by everybody—Herbie, Jerry Moss, and Jerry Weintraub—everybody. She had a huge support system when she started this thing.”

  Arriving at Karen’s Century City condo for the first time, Ramone was caught off guard when the doorbell chimed the first six notes of “We’ve Only Just Begun.” “Isn’t that an amazing bell?” Karen said as she answered the door. “I had a guy make it for me, and it’s exactly as I sang it!”

  Phil was puzzled by Karen. He knew her only as the naive girl he had seen in publicity photos and on album covers. He was familiar with the duo’s biggest hits and was well aware of their reputation for attention to intricate details in the music, but Ramone’s goal was never to achieve the Carpenters’ echelon of perfection with Karen. In fact, his plan for her was to follow no set plan at all. “It was a lot of experimenting,” he recalls. “We were trying to make an artist’s complete dream.”

  Karen flew to New York on February 16, 1979, for further meetings with her producer, just a week prior to his receiving the Record of the Year Grammy for Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Ramone interrupted Karen when she began talking about recording tracks in Los Angeles at A&M and how she planned to record with all the musicians and engineers she and Richard had known and trusted for years. “No, no,” he told her. “You have got to come back to New York. A&M’s a great studio to cut in, but it will confuse the issue.”

  After much consideration, it was agreed that Karen would fly to New York to record with Ramone at his own A&R Recording Studios in Manhattan. “Coming to New York was a big thing for her and for me,” he says. “We talked about what the approach should be. How do you make a record when your whole reputation is built on your life as a Carpenter? I personally didn’t want to touch anything in that world. I thought of her as an actor who had been typecast, like Judy Garland was typecast after The Wizard of Oz. She made all those Andy Hardy movies. Recording artists get typed, too. I said to Karen, ‘It is like comedians who want to do a serious role as a singer and singers who want to be comedians. You must be cautious here.’”

  DESPITE HAVING put his stamp of approval on a solo project for Karen, Jerry Weintraub’s concern for her health and well-being remained. He was intrigued when he came across a television interview with Steven Levenkron, a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, promoting The Best Little Girl in the World, his new novel about “the obsession that kills.” Weintraub was immediately impressed with the therapist’s convincing tone and perceived knowledge of the subject matter, and felt Karen would surely benefit from meeting with Levenkron. Little did he know, Karen was already familiar with Levenkron after having become engrossed with the book at first reading. Weintraub’s call to the therapist was returned after several days, at which time he explained his concern for Karen and the struggle that had become apparent some four years prior.

  With Richard present, Karen phoned Steven Levenkron in New York from Weintraub’s office on March 27, 1979. She purposely moved away from the men and spoke softly in an attempt to keep the conversa
tion private. During their brief exchange Karen felt she had been able to convince the therapist that she was not suffering with anorexia nervosa but a gastrointestinal problem, specifically colitis. Levenkron urged her to find a qualified gastrointestinal specialist and wished her good luck. Returning to Richard and Weintraub, Karen lied, saying that Levenkron could tell she did not have anorexia from their conversation. They were skeptical but pleased to know she had made a significant step in just making the call, an act that hushed the two, if only temporarily.

  To further appease Richard and Weintraub, Karen checked into Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles for a few days of diagnostics. Exhausted and, of course, underweight, she must have thought that going to these lengths would calm the fears of those around her—or at least appear to be an effort on her part to get well.

  The April 1979 fan club newsletter told of Karen’s solo venture, sparking concern from fans afraid this meant an end to the duo. At that time, no one really knew for certain, not even Karen and Richard themselves. In an attempt to calm fears, the club’s next issue included the following statement.

  To dispel any rumors that the group has split up, Karen wishes to assure you this is not so. The reason for the temporary lapse in their recordings is that after ten arduous years of concentrating on perfecting music to the Carpenters standards we expect, Richard felt the need for a long vacation which probably will extend into the New Year. Karen reaffirms they will resume work on their album whenever Richard feels ready. He is really enjoying the freedom from pressures, and we must not be selfish in denying him the time off he deserves.