Little Girl Blue (25 page)

Maria Galeazzi witnessed the reprimands during her time on the road with the group, too. “Richard was very intense and very dedicated,” she says. “He was more methodical and would explain, ‘We have to do this the next show or that the next show.' Karen would be more like, ‘You screwed up!'”

By 1974 everyone needed a break. Richard and Sherwin have both claimed they never saw the Carpenters as a trendy act that would come and go, but their career appears to have been handled in such a way that someone felt exploitation was the necessary means to success, even if it only proved to be in the form of short-term financial success. But even the financial successes were not of great substance. Their attorney, Werner Wolfen, put pen to paper and later informed the Carpenters they would not see a cent of profit until they had performed a minimum of 150 shows in any given year.

Concert reviews from this period agreed that the Carpenters needed time to relax and regroup. One such review for a show at the Sahara Tahoe appeared in
Variety
: “
Not much showmanship
. . . they sorely need advice on stage presentation and pace. . . . Attending a show is no more than listening to an album.” It was true. A Carpenters concert was almost more of a recital of hit songs. From Karen and Richard came rigid directives to their band that every note must sound exactly as it did on the LP. “They were consummate musicians,” says Denny Brooks. “There wasn't a lot of patter between songs, they just kept knocking out hit after hit after hit.”

Although little time remained for recording, Karen and Richard managed to release three singles in 1974: “I Won't Last a Day Without You” (by then two years old and the fifth single culled from their mammoth hit album
A Song for You
), “Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town” (a track they put to tape in 1972), and one new recording, “Please Mr. Postman.” Following closely on the heels of the success of their
Now and Then
album and its side of oldies, the Carpenters decided to record “Postman” as a stand-alone oldie. When the Carpenters' version became their third #1 single, it also marked the second time the song reached the top position on the Hot 100. In 1961 the original recording by the Marvelettes was the first #1 record to come out of Motown Records. It was also a popular album track on the Beatles' 1963
With the Beatles
album.

“E
V
,
WOULD
you do me a favor?”

As she would often do, Karen came to Evelyn Wallace asking for assistance, but she usually prefaced her requests with this polite inquiry. “It kind of tickled me,” Wallace recalls.

“Karen, you're my
boss
,” she would respond. “All you have to do is say, ‘Ev, do this,' or ‘Ev, do that.' I'd be happy to. You don't have to ask me, just tell me what you want done, and I'll do it.'” Both women laughed at these exchanges.

It was Halloween 1974. Although Karen had moved back in with Agnes and Harold, it was only to be a short-term stay and a temporary
solution. She asked Werner Wolfen to start searching for real estate, preferably a nice condominium and one situated away from Downey. “She wanted me to tell her mother that she wanted to look around for an apartment,” Wallace explains. “Karen really wanted to move out of the house. I think her mother was getting her down to the point where she wanted out.”

“Will you ask her for me?” Karen pleaded.

“Karen, I'd do anything you asked me, and I will ask her. It would be best for everybody if you can, but I don't think you're going to have much luck.”

“OK,” Karen said. “Just wait until I am gone.”

After Karen left the house, Evelyn approached Agnes as she sat at the kitchen table. “The kids are at that age now, you know,” she began cautiously. “They've kind of, well, really got it made. You know?” Agnes's brow raised in anticipation of the next words. “Karen would kind of like to find a place and move into a little apartment by herself. A lot of the kids her age have been doing it for a while now.”

Agnes jumped from the table, leaving Evelyn midsentence. “Well, you'd think that I had hit her over the head with a brick,” Wallace says. “She jumped out of her chair and she ran to that phone and she called Karen, and she was screaming at her and calling her a traitor and asking how she could think such a thing.” Evelyn quietly picked up her purse, slipped out the door, and headed home. “I didn't want to slam the door and let her know I was going because I thought she'd come running after me,” she says. “She'd think that I gave that idea to Karen to move out, but I didn't. It was a surprise when Karen asked me to do that. That was the worst thing she ever asked me to do, but I would have died for that girl. She was such a lovely person.”

I
N 1996
,
Rob Hoerburger concisely and powerfully summed up Karen Carpenter's tribulations in a
New York Times Magazine
feature: “
If anorexia has
classically been defined as a young woman's struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world—her voice and her mother's love—were exclusively the property of Richard. At least she would control the size of her own body.” And control it she did. By September 1975 her weight dropped to ninety-one pounds.

Karen's quest to be thin seems to have begun innocently enough just after high school graduation when she started the Stillman water diet. Although she was never obese, she was what most would consider a chubby seventeen-year-old at 145 pounds. She leveled off around 120 pounds and maintained her weight by eating sensibly but not starving herself. Even so, eating while on tour was problematic for Karen, as she described in 1973: “
When you're on the road
it's kind of hard to eat. Period. On top of that, it's really rough to eat
well
. We don't like to eat before a show because I can't stand singing with a full stomach. . . . You never get to dinner until like midnight or one o'clock, and at that time if you eat heavy you're not going to sleep, and if you eat heavy you're going to be a balloon.”

Maria Galeazzi never witnessed any eating habits she considered to be compulsive or irrational during her years on tour with Karen. “When
I was with her she didn't have an eating problem,” Galeazzi says. “She always watched her weight because she had a problem with her hips. She was a little bit heavier around there, but she wasn't fat. She never made any comments but always watched what she ate. For instance, she would have two strips of bacon instead of four, or one egg instead of two, but not anything obsessive. I never saw her look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh, I'm so fat.' Not ever. I have no idea what triggered it.”

Karen was shocked when she saw photos taken during an August 1973 Lake Tahoe concert where an unflattering outfit accentuated her paunch. This prompted her to seek the assistance of a personal trainer, who made visits to her home and recommended a diet low in calories but high in carbohydrates. Instead of slimming down as she had hoped, Karen started to put on muscle and bulk up following this new regimen. Watching the Carpenters' appearance on a Bob Hope television special that fall, she remarked that she had put on some extra weight. Richard agreed she looked a bit heavier. She was quite discouraged and vowed she was going to “do something about it.”

Karen's first order of business was to fire her trainer, and she immediately set out on a mission to shed the unwanted pounds on her own. She purchased a hip cycle, which she used each morning on her bed, and because it was portable the equipment was packed and taken with her on tour. “She was working on it,” remembers Denny Brooks, who was along for several Carpenters tours during the mid-1970s. “She was a little thick through the hips and thighs and middle. I know that concerned her,” he says.

“She lost around twenty pounds and she looked fabulous,” recalls Carole Curb. “She weighed about 110 or so, and she looked amazing. . . . If she'd just been able to stop there then life would have been beautiful. A lot of us girls in that era went through moments of that. Everybody wanted to be Twiggy. Just about everybody in the world has some sort of eating disorder—they eat too much or they eat too little. Karen's just got carried away. She just couldn't stop.”

Having witnessed Karen's meticulous routine of counting calories and planning food intake for every meal, Richard complimented her initial weight loss during a break from recording as the two dined at the
Au Petit Café, a favorite French bistro on Vine Street near the A&M studios. “You look
great
,” he told her.

“Well, I'm just going to get down to around 105.”

“A hundred and
five
? You look great now.”

Karen's response worried Richard. In fact, this was the first time he paused to consider that she might be taking the diet too far.

“
With their success
and being up on stage, she attempted to slim down and look a little better in a feminine sort of way,” said Sherwin Bash, recalling her as a stocky tomboy prior to 1974. “Karen lost probably twenty pounds and looked terrific. . . . This didn't satisfy her because she needed more. She needed attention, love, care, and all the things that go with the success of losing that weight. Failing to get it, she continued to lose weight and became painfully thin. . . . Obviously she was looking at herself and seeing somebody that no one else saw; someone who was unattractive and overweight.”

As Mike Curb had witnessed a year earlier, friends and family began to notice extreme changes in Karen's eating habits, despite her attempts at subtlety. She rearranged and pushed her food around the plate with a fork as she talked, which gave the appearance of eating. Another of her strategies involved offering samples of her food to others around the table. She would rave on and on about her delicious meal and then insist that everyone at the table try it for themselves. “Here,
you
have some,” she would say as she enthusiastically scooped heaps of her own meal onto others' plates. “Would you like to taste this?” By the time dinner was over, Karen's plate was clean, but she had dispersed her entire meal to everyone else. Agnes caught on to this ploy and began to do the same in return. “Well,
this
is good, too,” she would say as she put more food onto her daughter's plate. This infuriated Karen, who realized she would have to find other ways to successfully avoid eating.

T
HUMBING THROUGH
a copy of
Reader's Digest
, Evelyn Wallace discovered an article detailing a teen girl's obsession with dieting. “She was doing the same things that Karen was doing, like playing with her food or leaving it,” Wallace says. “She was somehow always getting
away with not eating.” The following is excerpted from the January 1975 issue of the
Digest
.

The young high school sophomore weighed 135 pounds—about five pounds more than average for her height—and decided to diet. But when she reached her proper weight, she went right on depriving herself of food. Eight months later she entered a hospital weighing seventy-four pounds, the victim of self-inflicted starvation. Her bizarre affliction is known as anorexia nervosa.

An emotional disorder that affects thousands of young women during high school and college years, the disturbance appears to be increasing rapidly. Dr. Hilde Bruch, professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, believes that the national preoccupation with slimness plays a part in anorexia nervosa but that the condition is too complex to be defined simply as diet consciousness. The patient's refusal to eat, followed by grotesque emaciation, is the physical symptom of a deep-seated psychological disturbance. Most psychiatrists agree that the cure is twofold: putting back the weight to get the patient out of immediate danger and reaching the underlying emotional problems through psychotherapy.