Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Paramedics told the ER staff, “This is the lady who came from the Carpenter house in north Downey,” perhaps a subtle attempt to establish identity without compromising her privacy. In the field the team of paramedics had been unsuccessful in establishing an intravenous line after several attempts, so Tomlin continued the effort. Nurse manager Vivian Carr sat with Richard and Harold, who joined Agnes in a conference room adjacent to the emergency room. Inside, the crew went to work in further attempts at saving Karen. As personnel took their places, Dr. Irv Edwards reached for a laryngoscope and began the intubation process. A young respiratory technician and Carpenter family friend stepped forward with the respirator and began securing the bag and mask. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “It’s Karen!” The woman’s voice cut through the room’s intensity, and she began to sob hysterically. The others were quite perplexed by the outburst.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong with you?” Nurse Tomlin asked her.

  “It’s Karen,” she replied. “It’s Karen Carpenter!”

  Several members of the ER crew, including Tomlin, leaned over the bed for a closer look. “Holy shit,” she cried. “It is!” She was shocked to realize this body belonged to the youthful girl she knew only from the Carpenters’ album covers. Tomlin knew the words to most of the Carpenters’ hit songs, and the lyric to one of them immediately ran through her head: “So much of life ahead . . . And yes, we’ve just begun.” Tomlin sent one of the staff members to notify the hospital manager. “We knew this was going to turn into the nightmare from hell, publicity-wise.”

  Dr. Edwards was less concerned with the pending media circus and recalls only thinking of the Carpenter family. “This was an incredibly young woman who was too young to die,” he says. “What a terrible, terrible, terrible family tragedy this was. They were an extraordinarily popular and much beloved family in Downey, and she was a hometown celebrity.”

  The medical team at Downey Community spent twenty-eight minutes attempting to resuscitate Karen. “We worked on her for quite a while but then ended up calling the code,” Tomlin says. At 9:51 A.M., Karen Anne Carpenter was pronounced dead.

  Dr. Edwards emerged from the emergency room and entered the room where Harold, Agnes, and Richard were huddled. The rueful words stumbled from his mouth: “I’m sorry, but Karen is dead.” This was a heartrending but not uncommon task the doctor was required to carry out time and time again. “It’s never easy to tell a family that someone they love and is dear to them has died,” he says. “Richard was fairly composed. Incredulous, but somewhat composed. The parents were absolutely in a state of disbelief.”

  “Are you sure she’s gone?” they asked. “Can’t you do anything to bring her back?”

  “We took some time to explain things to the parents,” Edwards recalls, “and grieve with the family.” Richard was angry. Agnes and Harold were numb. Their faces filled with tears before asking, “May we see her?”

  DISPATCHED TO Downey Community Hospital at 9:55 A.M. for a “possible overdose,” patrolman J. Rice of the Downey Police Department spoke with Dr. Edwards and his staff, who advised him of Karen’s history of anorexia nervosa and depression. “She was extraordinarily thin and what I would describe as gaunt looking,” recalls Dr. Edwards. “She did have the appearance or the persona of a person who had anorexia nervosa. In part of my evaluation of Karen we did test her blood sugar, and it was very, very elevated.” Tests revealed a blood sugar level of 1,110, which equated to approximately ten times the norm. In Dr. Edwards’s opinion, the immediate cause of death was a “hyperosmolar diabetic coma.”

  Patrolman Rice questioned Karen’s parents at the hospital before escorting them home. The family’s agony and anguish during the three-mile drive back to Newville without Karen was immeasurable. By the time Harold, Agnes, and Richard returned, the street had been barricaded by local authorities who were stationed at the corner to assist in providing some sort of privacy for the grief-stricken family. National and local media soon swarmed the neighborhood. Heartbroken fans overtaken with sorrow and disbelief gathered behind police lines after hearing the news: “Singer Karen Carpenter, who helped put soft rock at the top of the charts, is dead at the age of thirty-two of a heart attack.”

  Running errands in anticipation of spending the afternoon with Karen, Frenda Leffler was driving up Palm Drive in Beverly Hills when she caught a special report on the radio. “I almost ran into a tree,” she recalls. “Of course I didn’t believe it. I went home and I was just in a daze. I opened the back door and I saw Eddie, who was never home early. . . . He looked at me and said, ‘She’s gone.’ Even though we should have known, you don’t want to believe that something is really going to happen. You want to think that your loving her was going to make everything all right. But the last blow with this marriage was just more than her little body could take.”

  Olivia Newton-John also heard the news on her car radio as she traveled down a Los Angeles freeway. “It was a terrible shock,” she says. “I was meeting someone I didn’t even know for a business lunch at the Melting Pot on Melrose. I was still in shock, and when I sat down I just burst into tears. . . . It was just horrendous and such a shock. Poor girl, she’d been through a lot. We were supposed to have lunch the next day.”

  Returning from a business meeting of her own, Itchie Ramone arrived home to the sounds of ringing phones and the voices of a small group of friends crowded around her husband in the middle of the couple’s living room. “Have you listened to the radio this morning?” he asked.

  “No, I just went to the meeting and came out. Why?” She was alarmed to realize the room had fallen silent. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “It’s about Karen,” Phil said cautiously.

  “Oh good God, what has she done now?” she laughed, but Phil remained serious.

  “What’s wrong? Phil, what’s the matter? Is she ill? Is she in the hospital? What’s wrong with her?”

  “It was her heart,” he said.

  “It was her heart? Is she dead? Did she die?”

  As Karen had predicted, Phil and Itchie welcomed their new baby boy, B. J. Ramone, the following week on February 7.

  At Cal State Long Beach, Frank Pooler was in a rehearsal when his assistant heard the news reports over the radio. “Come on, let’s go over to the office,” the assistant told him. “I’ve got some sad news for you. Karen just died.”

  Pooler attempted to reach Richard, who proved to be incommunicado. “I went down to the house that night. It was all cordoned off with cops so I just gave them a letter for Richard. I volunteered the choir for anything they might want to have sung at the service.”

  John Bettis was in a writing session in Nashville. “Those things don’t hit you right off,” he recalled. “It’s almost as if you’re watching a TV show or something. It’s an out-of-body experience.” He immediately called Richard and was surprised to get through. “I don’t know how you feel, but I’m mad as hell,” he told Richard, later regretting the words he came to feel were egocentric. “The selfishness of my first reaction has haunted me because I actually felt as if Karen had taken something from me that I didn’t want to be without. My first reaction was, ‘How selfish of you.’ Isn’t that odd? Since then I’ve had the other emotions, but that was the first one. I felt cheated.”

  Richard agreed. “My immediate reaction was anger,” he told People Weekly in 1983. “Anger at the waste of her life and the loss of her talent. Then the grief set in. The shock was tremendous—I knew she was ill but not that ill.” He also admitted to being angry with himself, the therapists, the doctors, and the hospitals.

  In Connecticut, C. J. Cuticello raced to get in touch with his wife, Debbie. “Before you turn on the radio or do anything, this is what has happened,” he said.

  Shaken and stunned by her husband’s words, Debbie spent the day recalling her special memories of Karen. “Disbelief,” she says. “That was a hard day. That was tough.” Bittersweet were her emotions as she went
to the mailbox the next day only to find the photos Karen had sent after what proved to be their final phone conversation a few days earlier.

  C.J. also broke the news to Frank Bonito, who was employed as a medical social worker at the time. “Channel 8 News has been trying to get you,” the receptionist in his office mentioned.

  “I had no idea as to why,” Bonito says. “C.J. contacted me and he told me. Thankfully he got to me before the TV news. You see this on the news all the time where they call someone up and say, ‘Did you hear that so-and-so died?’ That is not the way you want to hear about it!”

  Songwriter Paul Williams was in Washington D.C. “I was at Wolf Trap with Elizabeth Taylor and doing a big benefit. The news of the day was that Karen had died. Everybody was just stunned. I remember being devastated for everybody, for all of us, for her, and for everyone,” he says. “I think that most of us around A&M and those who’d had contact knew what was going on, but the feeling was that she was doing a lot better.” At the Cap Centre’s Wolf Trap Gala, Williams sang “We’ve Only Just Begun” as a tribute to Karen. “An angel sang this song for me,” he told the crowd of more than twelve thousand. As he tried to hold back his emotions, tears filled his eyes, and the stage lights were brought down.

  Also in the nation’s capital was Carole Curb, living in Paris at the time but visiting her brother Mike, who’d relocated to D.C. the month prior. “I was on the way to the airport to fly back to L.A. to visit my parents, and I heard it on the radio,” she says. “I remember falling to the floor of the limo. I just fell on the floor.” Mike Curb was in route to London and heard the news in the airport. “I was so jolted when I heard she’d died that I was just in a state of total shock. I almost fainted. The feeling I had was that she was working her way through it. A lot of people go through a tough time after a bad marriage. . . . I remember how frail she had looked the last time I had seen her, but then my sister had a lot of those same issues. My sister is still alive, so why isn’t Karen still alive?”

  News reports began hinting that the cause of death was believed to be associated with anorexia nervosa, but this information did little to lessen the astonishment of even those reporting the story. C. P. Smith of the Orange County Register wrote: “It’s hardly surprising when one of rock’s hard-livers dies at an early age. The passing of a Janis Joplin or a Jimi Hendrix is perhaps understandable in a macabre fashion—it’s as though the nature of their gut-level music made death into more of an occupational hazard than anything else. But the passing of Karen Carpenter at the age of thirty-two came as a complete shock.”

  INVESTIGATORS WITH the Downey Police Department drove housekeeper Florine Elie to Karen’s Century City residence, where they searched the premises looking for anything unusual or suspicious. “They went through the house and rumbled around,” she recalls. “I just sat there and waited on them.” They confiscated several bottles of prescription medication and various items unknown to Elie before returning her to Newville, where the mood was somber, to say the least. “They were real sad,” Elie remembers. “They didn’t talk or do hardly anything.”

  A bottle of Ativan tablets, commonly used to treat anxiety disorders, was turned over to investigators. The pills were prescribed by Dr. George Monnet on January 10, 1983, and filled at the local Gemco pharmacy. Monnet later told the investigators he suspected Karen might have also been taking Lasix, a potent diuretic, and not taking the required potassium supplements. In his opinion, this might have caused a cardiac arrhythmia.

  On the afternoon of February 4, Los Angeles County medical examiner Dr. Ronald Kornblum conducted autopsy number 83-1611. It began at 2:30 P.M. and lasted two hours. Pending results of further lab tests, the immediate cause of death was marked “deferred.” Word from National Medical Services, a Pennsylvania-based clinical toxicology and forensic testing firm, came early in March. The autopsy report became final on March 11, and the certificate of death was amended to list the cause of death as “emetine cardiotoxicity due to or as a consequence of anorexia nervosa.” The anatomical summary listed pulmonary edema and congestion (usually caused by heart failure) first and anorexia second. Third was cachexia, which usually indicates extreme weight loss and an apparent lack of nutrition. The finding of emetine cardiotoxicity (ipecac poisoning) revealed that Karen had poisoned herself with ipecac syrup, a well-known emetic commonly recommended to induce vomiting in cases of overdose or poisoning. A letter detailing National Medical Services’s lab findings was composed March 23, 1983. After testing both blood and liver, it was determined that 0.48 micrograms/g emetine, “the major alkaloidal constituent of ipecac,” was present in the liver. “In the present case,” they explained, “the finding of 0.5 micrograms emetine/g, with none detected in the blood, is consistent with residua of the drug after relatively remote cessation of its chronic use.”

  In a press release detailing Karen’s autopsy report and cause of death due to emetine cardiotoxicity, the coroner failed to cite ipecac by name. “It never occurred to me to mention ipecac,” Kornblum later told People Weekly journalist Gioia Diliberto in her exposé detailing the dangers of the syrup. “In my mind, emetine and ipecac are the same things.”

  Karen’s therapist Steven Levenkron claimed to know nothing of Karen’s use or abuse of ipecac. He was reportedly shocked to even hear the word “emetine” as part of the official cause of death. In their phone calls following her return to Downey in November 1982, Levenkron had quizzed Karen about weight maintenance and laxative use. She assured him she was maintaining her new 108-pound figure and had completely suspended use of all laxatives. He never dreamed she was resorting to something much more lethal.

  Although she had kept the ipecac secret from Levenkron, Karen had shared with Cherry O’Neill that she was resorting to the syrup on occasion. “She did mention ipecac and admitted to using it to make herself throw up,” says O’Neill. “She said she could never make herself throw up so she resorted to using syrup of ipecac to purge. I don’t think she knew the dangers of using that substance for more than just emergencies. Not many people knew back then. The combination of self-starvation, the poisoning effect of ipecac over time, and not strengthening her heart and body with regular exercise probably became a lethal combination for her. I remember being concerned that she took ipecac and laxatives to purge, which are probably the most dangerous methods. I was also told that she resumed her use of diuretics upon returning to Los Angeles, and it was obviously more of a drain on her body than she was able to endure.”

  Itchie Ramone had feared Karen was resorting to ipecac and, after hearing of the autopsy findings, was reminded of a phone conversation the two had the day after Thanksgiving 1982 when Karen’s voice sounded weak and raspy. “What’s wrong with your voice?” Itchie asked her.

  “Oh, I was throwing up a bit,” she said. “I think I ate a little too much.”

  “Oh, no,” she thought to herself. “Please tell me it’s not ipecac!” The Ramones had kept a bottle of ipecac in their kitchen cabinet for years, just in case of emergencies, and it went untouched for the duration of Karen’s stay during the recording of the solo album. She believes Karen may have begun using the syrup sporadically in late 1980. “Karen hated to throw up! But I know it started a bit after she met Tom. It was sort of an introduction with ipecac, and it was not a constant. The laxatives were. When she was in New York in 1982 she was not taking ipecac. That habit must have formed after she got home. I was just shocked.”

  In a radio interview taped shortly after Karen’s death, Levenkron discussed the autopsy findings: “According to the L.A. Coroner, she discovered ipecac . . . and she started taking it every day. There are a lot of women out there who are using ipecac for self-induced vomiting. It creates painful cramps, it tastes terrible, and it does another thing that the public isn’t aware of. It slowly dissolves the heart muscle. If you take it day after day, every dose is taking another little piece of that heart muscle apart. Karen, after fighting bravely for a year in therap
y, went home and apparently decided that she wouldn’t lose any weight with ipecac, but that she’d make sure she didn’t gain any. I’m sure that she thought this was a harmless thing she was doing, but in sixty days she had accidentally killed herself. It was a shocker for all of us who treated her.”

  In one of Steven Levenkron’s most recent books, Anatomy of Anorexia, the author boasts of his above-average recovery rate in working with those suffering from eating disorders. “In the last twenty years I have treated nearly 300 anorexics,” he wrote. “I am pleased to state that I have had a ninety percent recovery rate, though tragically, one fatality.” That was Karen Carpenter.

  SADDENED BY the death of his friend and client, hairstylist Arthur Johns recalls being shocked but not all that surprised to learn of her death. “It just seemed like nothing was going right in Karen’s life,” he says. “From the failed marriage to going to New York and being hospitalized, it seemed like it was one thing after another.” Shortly thereafter, Johns received a call from Agnes asking if he would prepare Karen’s hair and makeup prior to the public viewing. “Her mother was so pleading and so upset,” he recalls. “I found myself saying yes before I even realized how big and how emotional this might be for myself. And it was.” Johns called on a good friend to accompany him to the mortuary, where he worked to style Karen’s hair one last time. “I was so young myself. Before this I had not done anybody that had died.”

  Hundreds of friends and fans attended a visitation held Sunday evening, February 6, under the direction of Downey’s Utter-McKinley Funeral Home and held at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Mortuary in Cypress. Guests filed past the white casket adorned with red and white roses to view Karen’s body, which was clothed in a rose-colored two-piece suit. A thin, sheer veil draped across the casket’s opening, and a barrier of floral arrangements helped keep visitors at a distance in hopes of somehow masking Karen’s gaunt form. Agnes, Harold, and Richard, along with other family members, greeted those paying their last respects to Karen throughout the evening. “Most kept their visits short, some chatting quietly about pleasant memories, others bowing their heads in silence,” reported the local newspaper.