Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Friends suggested she and Tom seek marital counseling. Instead, the Carpenters prepared to leave for Europe and South America. Itchie went along to keep Karen company on this series of Carpenters promotional tours, which began in Paris, France, where Karen’s laxative addiction became an issue. “Laxatives were her major companion,” Itchie says. “When we were in Paris we made quite a scene in a pharmacy across the street from our hotel about her needing to buy more laxatives. I suggested natural food groups that might relieve her ‘constipation,’ but she always won those arguments.”

  Following a brief stop in Amsterdam, the Carpenters arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport on Wednesday, October 21, 1981. They made numerous promotional appearances while in London, both in person and on television. On Thursday they taped an interview for Nationwide, a popular news magazine on BBC television. Barely one minute into their visit, host Sue Lawley surprised Karen by casting light on her darkest secret. “There were rumors that you were suffering from the slimmer’s disease anorexia nervosa,” Lawley said. “Is that right?”

  “No, I was just pooped,” Karen said with an intense frown. “I was tired out.”

  “You went down to about six stone in weight, I think, didn’t you?” Lawley asked.

  “I have no idea what ‘six stone in weight’ is,” Karen replied, becoming noticeably uncomfortable and increasingly agitated. She struggled to fake a laugh, rolling her eyes at the interviewer, who quickly converted the amount to approximately eighty-four pounds. “No,” she said, shaking her head adamantly. “No.”

  In actuality her weight was hovering around eighty pounds even then. The interviewer’s continued efforts to pinpoint a reason for Karen’s skeletal appearance prompted Richard to come to his sister’s defense. “I don’t really feel that we should be talking about the weight loss,” he told Lawley and producers. “Maybe it’s better to take a pass on the whole thing. It’s really not what we’re here for.”

  “I am just asking you the questions people want to know the answers to,” she replied.

  All involved regrouped, and the interviewer offered to pursue a new line of questioning geared toward Karen’s marriage, an almost equally unpleasant topic but one that Karen could fake her way through. Richard agreed to allow the questioning to continue. A labored exhalation was captured by Karen’s lapel microphone as Lawley instructed the Carpenters to relax. “Now, we have to pretend all that didn’t happen,” she joked.

  “Yeah, I feel terrific,” Karen chuckled with heavy sarcasm. And the interview continued. By this point Karen had become what author Ray Coleman called a “professional anorexic,” perfecting the deceit while assuring all those around her she was just fine. While she was considered by those who knew and loved her to be one of the most honest and open individuals they ever met, she was rarely truthful when it came to anorexia nervosa.

  RETURNING TO Los Angeles, Karen and Richard joined the Carpenter family to celebrate Harold Carpenter’s seventy-third birthday. Family and friends gathered on the evening of November 9, 1981, for dinner at Sambi of Tokyo, a favorite Downey restaurant. After dinner, the party continued at Newville, where Karen and Tom went upstairs and, as Richard recalled, “had it out.”

  Evelyn Wallace recalls no sign of tension during dinner but explains, “In the restaurant, Karen wouldn’t do that. She would be a lady in a restaurant.” After some time, an exasperated Tom barreled down the stairs exclaiming, “You can keep her!” As he raced away from the house in his car, cousin Joanie ran upstairs to comfort Karen, hugging her and telling her how much she loved and cared for her. The guests downstairs were speechless. Karen was humiliated and inconsolable.

  Although the family cites this episode at Newville as the last time Karen saw her husband, Frenda visited Karen back in Bel Air around this time and was shocked to find the couple in the process of making a twenty-thousand-dollar upgrade to a house they did not even own. This was oddly uncharacteristic of Karen, who had a reputation for being thrifty, a trait passed down from her parents. With Tom away, Frenda expressed concern to Karen over the unnecessary expense of home improvements. After all, it was a rented house, and the couple was on the verge of separating. “Karen was very frugal,” Frenda recalls. “She wasn’t frugal if she bought you a gift or something, but she earned her own money, and she paid a price for that money. She wasn’t cavalier about it, which I respected. I thought that was a wonderful way to be. She had some areas in which she didn’t have much sense, but she did have sense in the area of finances. If it had been five hundred dollars I wouldn’t have said anything, but this was a lot of money.”

  Arriving back home, Frenda was not surprised when the phone rang and it was Karen. It had not even been twenty minutes, but the two talked “fifty million times a day,” she says. But this call was different. Karen was in a panic. “Oh my God, Frenda! Oh my God, oh my God,” she said, her voice quivering in fear.

  “Kace, what is it?”

  “There was a man that came to the door and I let him in and he said something about the Corniche.”

  “Don’t tell me it was a burglar,” Frenda scolded. “Kace, you should never have let anybody in!”

  “No, no, no. They really were from the car agency,” Karen explained.

  “Well, what’s the problem then?”

  “Well, Tom never even bought me the car! It’s leased. And he hasn’t paid the lease in two months, and they were here to repossess the car. They offered to let me make restitution, and I said, ‘No, just take it!’”

  “Kace! Oh my God. I’m coming to get you.”

  “No, no, no,” Karen told her. “I want to talk to Tom about it when he comes home.”

  “All right,” Frenda said, “but I am going to get a hold of Eddie.”

  When Tom returned home Karen confronted him about the leased car. He became furious when he learned it had been repossessed by the dealership. Additionally, he wanted more money and her signature on yet another loan. Mustering up all the strength she could, Karen looked her husband in the eye and said, “Tommy, I am not a bank. I am not a bank.”

  Ed Leffler was on the golf course with friends that day and not easy to reach. As Frenda tried to contact her husband she heard three tiny taps from her brass door knocker. She opened the door to find Karen, who had driven across town after a falling-out with Tom. “She was in a hump, slumped over,” Frenda recalls. “Oh my God, I was hysterical. I tried so hard to be calm because I had two babies there, but I had to help her in the house. I will never forget that day as long as I live. I said, ‘That’s it. It’s over!’ She never went back to that house again. We cleaned it out. That was the end of it.”

  Karen moved in with Frenda for a short time and then back to her condo at Century Towers, telling friends and family she was afraid to return to the Bel Air estate due to recent burglaries in the neighborhood. “She wouldn’t go back,” Frenda explains. “She couldn’t go back. We wouldn’t let her go back. That was the end, and I know she never saw him again after that. That really was the beginning of the end of her life.”

  KAREN’S DISASTER of a marriage only served to exacerbate her mental illness and physical descent. “You expect a marriage to go through its ups and downs,” says Phil Ramone. “Unfortunately hers read exactly like the solo album, but it was her life. Its failure was exactly the same. That’s too much for any human being to take. Any way you look at it, that disaster was the final nail.” According to Itchie, “Karen tried to put a smile on her face all the time. No one wants to own up to having been deceived, especially with her life in the spotlight. Her wedding had been the centerfold of People. In truth, her marriage didn’t really last more than about three months.”

  Too embarrassed and ashamed to return home to Downey, Karen relied on Frenda and her parents, Ben and Melba, for support during this time of deep depression. “She would sit and my mother would cradle her like she was an infant,” Frenda recalls. Mealtime at the Leffler house became a dreaded and terribly painful experience
for all involved. “I’d make everything that she liked. Everything. She loved white fish, and she loved the way I made it. Then I made peas. I made everything that I knew she’d like, and she ate one pea!” Adding to the Lefflers’ frustration was the fact that Karen would carefully divide, sort, and compartmentalize the food on her plate. “I couldn’t help but notice,” Frenda says. “She’d make little patterns out of it. I’d watch it. Even that was artistic. Even in the mania she was an artist.”

  Frenda would sit patiently at the table with Karen long after the rest of the family had finished their meals and left the dining room. She tried every approach she could think of to encourage her friend to eat. “Now Kace, we can’t do this,” she would say. “Don’t make me feed you like a baby!” But Karen just sat quietly. “OK, then open your mouth. Here comes the choo-choo!”

  When Karen did manage to eat a few bites she would immediately say she felt sick and quickly disappear to the nearest bathroom. “She couldn’t keep food down,” Frenda says. “It was a serious depression, no question. I knew she was severely depressed when singing was the last thing on her mind. When you have a passion for music like she had, and all at once you can’t even think about it, something is definitely wrong. It was not about music anymore. It was not about fun anymore. It was about trying to eat something. Survival.” The absence of food and nutrients left Karen very weak, and she tired easily. This worried Frenda, but there was an underlying determination that showed through at times. “It was frightening,” she recalls, “but as sick as Karen was, she’d still want to give the twins their baths. She’d rub their little backs in circles. See, she still tried to do some of the things she loved doing.”

  While many around Karen felt her obsession with dieting had taken over, those who knew her intimately say that was not the case. There came a time when she did not want to lose more weight, but by then she knew the disorder was out of her control. She wanted to stop and was even ashamed of how she looked. As she had done years before, Karen began layering her clothes to disguise her skeletal frame. She would tell others she was cold and then add a sweatshirt to a turtleneck sweater. “She’d put on so many layers of clothing because she didn’t want people to know she was that thin,” Frenda says. “My feeling always was that she wanted to disappear. I certainly know that’s not a medical diagnosis, but that is what it seemed like.”

  “RICHARD, I realize I’m sick and I need help.” As 1981 came to an end, Karen was more freely expressing this realization to family and friends. She went to her brother and finally admitted things had gone too far. Something had to be done—and soon.

  “How do I get over this?” she asked a group of girlfriends who gathered for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She expressed to them how she felt a great deal of responsibility on her shoulders. In addition to her efforts to maintain a successful career, she spent a lot of time worrying about family issues. Her friends sensed that Karen was constantly trying to keep all members of her family happy, with no time left to take care of herself. She wanted to get help but felt guilty even considering the idea of putting everything on hold to address her personal problems. “Maybe I should just wait for the perfect time,” she said.

  “Life can’t always be that perfect, Kace,” Frenda told her from time to time. “It just can’t be. You can’t be all things to all people all the time. You’re just one little girl!”

  “Her face was all eyes,” Carole Curb recalls. “She looked like she weighed somewhere between eighty and ninety pounds. As I look back I can tell she was reaching out. She’d succeeded in everything else, and she wanted a scientific formula for how she could get over this. I think that she just couldn’t quite pull it together. In retrospect, she was pleading for help, which we all wish we’d given more of.” Over the years, Curb struggled with her own weight issues and an ongoing battle with anorexia. “In that era we all had little bouts of that. It was really in vogue then. Maybe it’s never been out of vogue. Mine wasn’t anything like hers. I never got down to eighty pounds. But she would ask me questions about it, and I would try to give her answers.”

  Karen’s food issues had been obvious to Olivia Newton-John for several years by this time, but Newton-John admits it was difficult for her to identify with or comprehend what her friend was experiencing. “Anorexia was not something that was talked about or known about in those days,” she says. “People were very thin, but you didn’t realize what it was. When I looked at Karen I saw this face with these big, beautiful, soulful brown eyes and this funny, quirky personality. . . . She was a clown on the outside, but you know how clowns are—they are sometimes sad on the inside and funny on the outside—that was Karen.”

  Karen also reached out once again to Cherry O’Neill. “The fact that I had blazed the trail of recovery before her gave her hope to think she could do the same,” O’Neill says. “I think she was looking for encouragement and inspiration along her own journey toward wellness. Karen was acknowledging her own eating disorders and was actively seeking help. I think she knew that she needed to get serious about dealing with her problem, but she didn’t want to talk with just anybody. As a public figure, she knew that she was dealing with pressures and expectations that were much different than most people struggling with eating disorders. Perhaps she thought I could identify with those pressures and expectations better than most other people.”

  O’Neill sensed that Karen sincerely wanted to get better. “She was very blunt and straightforward in the way she spoke about it, and she knew she could do it.” What fascinated Karen was that Cherry had seemingly recovered by that time. She was also happily married with a young child, the life Karen still longed for, even though deep down she knew it could never be with Tom Burris. She spoke little of her marital issues or her separation from Tom. Instead Karen remained focused on the matter at hand. “What was behind her was in the past, and she was trying to focus on her future and on moving forward,” O’Neill says. “She just felt like she had tried her best and was sorry the marriage failed. She didn’t like failure and probably felt it reflected on her personally. That is another hard pill to swallow for perfectionists, and almost all anorexics are.”

  As she had told Karen several years earlier, Cherry O’Neill believed Karen needed to make some radical changes to her surroundings and suggested she leave Los Angeles for a quieter, more sedate environment where she could work through her issues and take plenty of time to properly heal. “I actually recommended she consider coming to the Northwest and seeing the doctor who helped me,” she says. “The pace was so much slower, the values less superficial, and the natural beauty absolutely awe-inspiring and invigorating.”

  But in Karen’s world, one name was synonymous with anorexia treatment, and that name was Steven Levenkron. Since the time she spoke with the therapist by phone from Jerry Weintraub’s office several years earlier, his successful book The Best Little Girl in the World had become a highly acclaimed television movie, which aired in May 1981. Levenkron’s high profile was a huge factor in helping make this decision. Plus, a move from Los Angeles to the Big Apple sure seemed radical enough in terms of distance. In reality, the two cities could not have been more similar as far as pace and environmental pressures were concerned.

  With Karen’s consent, Itchie Ramone phoned Steven Levenkron, telling him of an anonymous celebrity she represented. He considered his extensive list of clients to be held under the strictest confidence and was annoyed to talk around a situation such as this. He refused to discuss the possibility of someone in need of his help and demanded this “unnamed famous person” call him directly. “Well, it’s Karen Carpenter,” Itchie finally revealed. Levenkron immediately recalled the brief conversation with Karen two and a half years earlier, when she’d assured him she was fine and did not have anorexia. Itchie told him that was simply not the case and that Karen had lied to him, but she was very sorry and desired very much to meet with him.

  The following day, Karen called Levenkron herself from
Los Angeles, informed him she had purchased a plane ticket to New York, and began detailing her plan for recovery—she would be arriving that Saturday and would see him for three hours. When the therapist explained that he was a family man who did not keep hours on weekends, Karen broke down. “This will only take you a couple of hours,” she promised. Taking back control of the conversation, Levenkron firmly explained that Karen was entirely wrong to think she would be cured after one quick consultation. Enumerating the minimum requirements for treatment, he told her to sit down and really think about whether or not she was ready to fight. If her answer was an honest “yes” then he would be willing to help her. But she would need to move to New York, at least temporarily.

  Karen immediately phoned Itchie, tattling on Levenkron for upsetting her. But Itchie supported the therapist’s suggestions and affirmed that she should consider relocating to New York. Like Cherry O’Neill, she felt Karen would greatly benefit from time away from Los Angeles and the strict schedule of work and life there. Itchie’s encouragement prompted a return call from Karen to Levenkron, just three hours after the first. Her new plan was to move to New York and see him an hour a day, five days a week. He agreed.

  Sharing the news with family and friends, Karen was met with much support and without questions, although Evelyn Wallace did her best to talk Karen out of relocating to New York. “Karen, there are wonderful doctors right here in L.A. that could help you,” she said, “and they have lovely hospitals here, too.” Wallace’s attempts proved futile. “She wanted to get as far away from her mother as she could,” she explains. “New York was a place she figured her mother couldn’t be running up to all the time.”