Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  According to Itchie, “Everybody had input as far as the album was concerned. . . . I remember Billy Joel coming in the studio and saying, ‘Uh, excuse me, but why am I not doing keyboards?’” Paul Simon stopped in as well. “They treated her like a major mega artist,” Itchie says. “I think she really needed that in becoming her own self. It really got her started building a backbone. It was her environment, and everybody was there to support her, and she absolutely loved it.”

  Paul Simon recommended to Karen his own “Still Crazy After All These Years,” a song originally produced by Phil Ramone on the Grammy Album of the Year for 1976. “It expressed a lot of what she wanted to say,” Ramone recalls. “But she had Paul rewrite a line. It used to be ‘crapped out, yawning’ and she did ‘crashed out, yawning.’ We talked about how that song wouldn’t be a Carpenters song!” Karen’s vocal on the mellow, jazz-inflected “Still Crazy” was self-assured, relaxed, and alluring. She also recorded Simon’s “I Do It for Your Love” and, in true Carpenters fashion, the oldie “Jimmy Mack,” a Motown hit for Martha and the Vandellas in 1967. The initial rhythm tracks and work leads for these two showed little promise, and both went unfinished. Another outtake, a real diamond in the rough, was “Something’s Missing in My Life,” a stunning ballad by Jay Asher and Paul Jabara and recorded by Jabara as a duet with Donna Summer on his 1978 album Keeping Time.

  Karen felt challenged by the intricate background vocal arrangements, many of which took on a brass-influenced instrumental feel. Bob James was responsible for several arrangements, including “If I Had You,” the most funky, demanding, and ambitious of all. Like Ramone, he felt obligated to move Karen out of the Carpenters mold. “I wanted to give her something different and challenging,” James explains. “I was very intrigued to find out how she would react to an arrangement that was deliberately moving away from the Carpenters sound.” Karen’s inimitable style on the sophisticated “If I Had You” resulted in an original and captivating piece of ear candy with a complex, multilayered call-and-response ending, the brainchild of Rod Temperton.

  Although Karen had conveyed to her brother the vocal challenges she faced when singing Bob James’s arrangements, she spoke very little about Richard to the guys in the studio. “I don’t recall Karen ever mentioning him,” Russell Javors says. According to Frenda, despite having given Karen the go-ahead, Richard was “not supportive” of the project after it got underway. “I don’t want to pick on him,” she says. “He wasn’t exactly in good shape. His and Karen’s timing was always off, but I know during that whole time when Karen did the album and stayed with Phil and Itchie, he was never supportive. . . . We were all hoping that because she finally was able to do this that it could be the catalyst to really turn everything around. Nothing else was doing it.”

  Sitting down at the drums next to Lib (as she and others referred to Liberty DeVitto), Karen joked, “Let me show you what I got,” before tearing into the kit. A second-generation Italian-American, DeVitto taught himself to play drums after having seen the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. He claims to have been a closet Carpenters fan even prior to meeting Karen. “I never bought a record but knew all their songs,” he says. DeVitto was attracted to Karen from the start, and his feelings grew the more time the two were together. “To be honest with you, I fell in love with Karen,” he says. “I was married at the time, but I felt like I wanted to be with her. Silly, I know. I had no idea how she would have felt about that so I just kept it to myself.” When asked his views on Karen as a drummer, the comic emerged: “Is this the part where I am supposed to get in trouble by saying, ‘She was all right for a girl’?”

  Karen was drawn to the drums as if by some gravitational pull. Occasionally she would go to the studio before the others arrived and sit down behind the battery of drums. “Those days are over,” she told Ramone. “I’m not sitting behind the drums and singing anymore.”

  Sensitive to this downhearted moment he replied, “Well, you never know.”

  “It doesn’t help my rear end,” she told him.

  Ramone thought Karen looked good during the first recording sessions and did not sense any unusual eating habits. Even so, her comment at the drums that day stuck out in his mind. He had been cautioned about her eating disorder by others. “But there were no clues at all at first,” he says. “If there were dead giveaways they came later. Everything seemed logical and fine. Sitting down at a meal was to sit down to have a meal. I know a lot of nitpickers. She wasn’t a fusspot.”

  In her free time, Karen enjoyed going with Itchie to Serendipity, a favorite Manhattan restaurant, and out to the Bottom Line, a popular Greenwich Village music club. She also liked eating seafood but only with an abundance of lemons. “She had a little bit of fish with her lemons!” Itchie laughs. “Then we would eat stone crab claws at Joe’s Pier Fifty-Two across from A&R Studios every night until the stone crab season was over.” The trio of Karen, Phil, and Itchie also attended a baseball game at Shea Stadium in Queens where Karen immediately noticed the initials “K.C.” on the scoreboard. “Look, it’s for me—K.C.!”

  “Come on, Karen,” Ramone chuckled. “That’s Kansas City, the team!” A few minutes later Karen was thrilled to hear the announcer say, “Please welcome Karen Carpenter from the Carpenters,” as strains of “We’ve Only Just Begun” echoed across the park.

  “Oh, here comes Lucy and Ethel,” the guys in the band would tease when Karen and Itchie would arrive at the studio together. According to Itchie, she was the Ethel to Karen’s Lucy in almost every scenario. Karen’s collection of I Love Lucy videotapes often traveled with her. A favorite episode was “The Ballet,” in which Lucy trained with Madame LeMond, an authoritarian ballet teacher. “I think we should go to the barre,” LeMond said.

  “Oh good,” Lucy replied, “’cause I’m awful thirsty!”

  After becoming entangled in the barre, Lucy cried out “Ahh-ba, Ahh-ba,” in hopes of freeing her leg. Watching this, Karen and Itchie would laugh until they cried. The “Ahh-ba” exclamation became a part of the twosome’s banter with one another. “Sometimes Karen was really tired and really had to be ‘on’ for a performance or whatever,” Itchie explains. “She’d yell out ‘Ahh-ba!’” In observance of their inside joke, Karen bought Itchie a wristwatch. On the underside was engraved AHH-BA!

  Karen sometimes phoned childhood friend Debbie Cuticello asking to spend the weekend at her home in Guilford, Connecticut, an hour from Phil’s estate. “She wanted the chance to get away and enjoy some good Italian home-cooked meals,” Cuticello recalled in 1983. “I remember the big limo driving down my driveway, and I wondered what her thoughts would be about the quiet little town of Guilford. She loved the quiet and the comfort.”

  Some weeks later, Debbie and her husband, C.J., made the two-hour drive into Manhattan to visit Karen at A&R Recording Studios, where she and Ramone played several songs for the couple. Debbie was especially taken with the contemporary sound of the recordings. “It was wonderful, like an angel’s voice,” she says. “I was impressed.”

  The reception at home on the West Coast was less enthusiastic. With a handful of songs completed, Karen flew home to Los Angeles, excited to play the new recordings for her family and friends. This was one of several returns to Southern California during the solo project, each of which proved to be a setback as far as her energy and progress in the studio with Ramone was concerned. Friend Carole Curb felt Karen was torn between these two lives. The decision to move to New York and record a solo album was actually a huge weight on Karen’s shoulders. “I just heard that she had decided to go off on her own,” Curb says. “It was a big decision to make, and I think all these things contributed to a lot of anxiety. It’s hard to leave the nest.”

  Needless to say, the nest was thrilled to have Karen back but not as excited once they heard the material she had been recording. “Agnes did not like the idea that Karen came out and did this project at all,” Itchie says. “She was a very rough person as it
was, but then she didn’t particularly care for me. Whenever I would go to their house I would speak to Harold, not Agnes. Karen was much closer to her dad, but there wasn’t really a whole lot of communication, but he would be loose with me, whereas Agnes was a Gestapo agent. With Agnes there was not a list of dos and don’ts. It was just don’ts.”

  Although Agnes was disappointed in Karen for attempting an album without Richard, overall she put very little stock in the solo endeavor. According to Evelyn Wallace, “As far as Agnes was concerned, regardless of how many records Karen would have made, to her mother they’d never be as good as Richard’s.”

  Phil Ramone was surprised by the negative response from the family and, in time, those at A&M as well. “I feel like I’ve taken your daughter out on a date and was supposed to be home by midnight but came in at 12:01 A.M.,” he told Jerry Moss. “It’s like you met me at the door saying ‘I hope you didn’t change my daughter.’”

  “What could I change?” Ramone asks now. “There are accusations that come at you, like when I worked with Julian Lennon they said, ‘You made him sound like his dad.’ Man, if I am that good then why couldn’t I do it for me? You cannot do something for somebody unless they want it done. We weren’t out to change the world, but we were certainly representing her coming of age. And I mean that in the best possible way.”

  RICHARD’S SUMMATION that Karen was not well enough to have embarked on such a grand plan was confirmed as she became weaker and thinner over the course of the project. Additionally, signs began to point to the possibility that she was resorting to bulimic practices, ridding her body of food she would ingest to give the appearance she was eating healthily. “She was very thin,” Russell Javors recalls. “My wife and I had dinner with her one night, and she ate a hell of a lot then excused herself. That was the first person we’d seen go through that ritual.”

  Itchie witnessed the same. “At one point she started to gorge herself,” she says. “It was amazing. She ate twice as much as me. She said that she had colitis, and I said, ‘Oh, so do I.’ I would go to the bathroom every single time she did. She would be so pissed because she was very uncomfortable having all this food in her.”

  In the spring of 1980, sitting at home with Phil and watching a video of herself on Olivia Newton-John’s recent Hollywood Nights TV special, Karen’s warped sense of body image surfaced. Dancing and singing alongside Olivia, Linda “Peaches” Greene (of Peaches and Herb), Toni Tennille, and Tina Turner, Karen looked radiant but too thin. “Oh, God, look how heavy I am,” she said. Ramone, baffled by what he’d just heard, jumped up from the couch, paused the videotape, and grabbed a nearby crayon. He proceeded to draw lines around each of the ladies’ bodies and observed that hers was like a pencil. “You’re just two lines,” he told her. “You don’t see that?”

  “No, look how fat I am. Look how big my hips are!”

  Ramone was incredulous and unable to convince Karen she was by far the thinnest of all the women on stage. Things took a turn for the worse one evening when Phil heard a loud “thump” sound come from his kitchen. Alarmed, he ran in to discover Karen passed out on the floor. She was so thin and frail he worried she might have broken a bone. He carefully moved her to the couch and phoned paramedics. By the time they arrived, Karen was lightheaded but alert. She refused to go in the ambulance and was concerned when she realized the paramedics were aware of her identity. On her behalf, Phil pleaded that they not release her name. Karen said the collapse was most likely due to her having taken half a quaalude earlier in the evening. It was unfathomable that she would have the pills in her possession after having dealt with Richard’s addiction.

  Following this scare, Karen attempted to ease the Ramones’ worries by promising to start eating properly, but just days later Itchie found laxatives hidden around the house. She found them in Karen’s room—in her luggage, her pillowcase, and even her shoes—and throughout the house behind cupboards and in a fruit bowl. Karen assured her that she wasn’t using them and just needed them there for security. Phil, Itchie, and their friends were extremely concerned. They knew something was very wrong but admit no one knew what they were dealing with. “The clues were there,” he says. “The treatment wasn’t.”

  As friendly and warm as Karen was to those involved in the project, Russell Javors sensed what he calls “a tinge of sadness about her. You could kind of sense that there was something going on. All the clues were there. . . . But the project was about music and not eating disorders. When you’re involved in a situation like that, first and foremost, you’re there to make a record. You’re there to make music.”

  RECORDING FOR the solo album wrapped in January 1980, by which time Karen had spent the customary $100,000 allotted by A&M Records, plus an additional $400,000 of her own. With the album in the mixing phase, A&M Records began a promotional campaign and assigned the album a catalog number, readying for a spring 1980 release. Several on the A&M lot recall the record was being talked up as a smash hit, and Phil Ramone noticed a renewed sense of optimism in Karen, who was finally exhibiting self-assurance in her work. “She was getting more and more confident,” he says.

  “So Kace, do you like the way Liv looks here?” Itchie asked, showing Karen the record jacket for Olivia Newton-John’s recently released Totally Hot LP.

  “Oh, look at ONJ!” Karen exclaimed, smiling at the cover photo shot by French glamour photographer Claude Mougin. While she was fond of the look, Karen had trouble picturing herself made up like Olivia, who had been photographed wearing black leather and intense eye makeup. Phil felt Karen’s photos should make a statement in congruence with the album’s sensual lyrical content. He contacted Mougin to shoot Karen’s album cover and promotional photos, which were captured during a two-hour session on February 2, 1980. Karen was accustomed to doing her own hair and makeup or having an assistant along with her on the road, but she rarely received a glamour treatment such as this. Being made up for this Vogue-style photo shoot was exciting, but Karen seemed nervous and panicky. “Maybe we should get you some herbal tea, Karen,” Itchie suggested.

  Unbeknownst to Karen, Itchie crushed up a Valium tablet and added it to her cup of tea. “I spiked her chamomile tea,” Itchie recalls. “I put honey and five milligrams of Valium, and she never even knew! She calmed down and was absolutely gorgeous.”

  When the photo proofs were delivered, Karen was amazed by the transformation; she looked sexy and provocative. She was ecstatic when she showed them to Itchie. “Itch, will you look at these?” she said, her eyes wide and mouth open in astonishment.

  “Yeah, so how do you feel about them?” Itchie asked.

  “I look pretty,” Karen said in astonishment. “I actually look pretty.”

  “But Kace, you’ve always looked pretty,” she was assured.

  Having selected eleven songs from more than twenty they recorded, Karen and Phil arranged a series of meetings to present the new album to those at the label. The first playbacks were held at A&R Studios in New York with London’s Derek Green representing the A&M label at the request of Jerry Moss. Champagne toasts and cheers of “congratulations” flowed freely as everyone celebrated the exquisite and sophisticated sounds Karen and Phil had succeeded in crafting. “It was the coming of a great new artist,” says Itchie. “In New York, everybody had their arms open and was excited—the whole nine yards!”

  All that remained was a West Coast playback at A&M in Hollywood for Alpert and Moss. At Karen’s request, Richard was asked to be present for the unveiling. According to Ramone, “The hardest thing in the world is to have to play back a record to your company that has known you and thinks of you in only one world. Karen certainly had confidence in what we were about to play, but she was nervous as hell. Overall, I think her deepest fear was Richard. He definitely did not like the record.”

  Song after song, Herb, Jerry, and Richard sat pokerfaced. It was a “den of silence,” according to Ramone, who began to bite his nails. He grew increasingly trouble
d with the passing of each song and sensed Karen’s mounting disillusionment, too. She expected cheers and hugs to celebrate each new track, as she had received in New York, but the three men remained impervious. “It’s easier when you have ten or twelve people in the room,” Ramone says. “My life has been made up of listening and watching and feeling an audience, even if it’s just four people. There was much discomfort, and they really had a hard time finding something to love.”

  “How could you do a disco record?” one asked following the playback. “Why would you attempt a song like that?” another wondered. “Well, somehow you’ve got to omit something,” they said. “We’re not happy.” Karen was ill prepared to defend the album and was disillusioned by the requests to do so.

  “Was this the wrong album for her? No,” Ramone says. “Was it not what the expectancy was? Yes. But I think if we’d made an album that was like what the Carpenters were doing at that time, then that would have been shot down even more. Richard decided that he wanted to get going with the Carpenters again—and the label got behind him on that. I think we were in a situation where people did not want to break up this team that was about to re-sign with the label.”

  Karen had previously played tracks from the album for Frenda, who was ecstatic—but mostly for Karen’s sake. “I liked it,” she tepidly summons up. “It was different. I can’t say it was the perfect album, but when you have the Carpenters sound in your ear, you have to kind of divorce yourself from that and go on with it.”

  When Karen played the album for Mike Curb, he was struck by her noticeable anxiety. “She was back in Los Angeles and called wanting me to hear the album,” he recalls. “I went over, and she played it for me, but she seemed very reticent to do the album and reticent to release it—reticent in terms of the effect it might have on her family.”