Little Girl Blue (30 page)

The album's savior came in the form of a Carpenter-Bettis original and what John Bettis considered to be “Goodbye to Love: Part Two.” “I Need to Be in Love” began as only a song title and a few bars of melody by Albert Hammond, who was writing songs with Bettis in England. Although their version of the song was never completed, the title was presented to Richard Carpenter, and it came to life in a way Bettis likened to “
a little ball of twine
” the duo “unrolled and knitted into a sweater.”

Karen declared “I Need to Be in Love” to be her autobiographical anthem from first listen. “
When he wrote the lyrics
to that thing I was just flabbergasted,” she said. “The first verse of that says, ‘The hardest thing I've ever done is keep believing / there's someone in this crazy
world for me / the way that people come and go through temporary lives / my chance could come and I might never know.' I said, ‘Oh my God, it's so true.'” Bettis felt the lyric told not only Karen's story but his own and Richard's as well. It was penned during a phase when all three were looking for love with no success. “
‘I Need to Be in Love'
is probably the most autobiographical and my favorite lyric ever written for Karen,” he explained. “If there was ever anything that came out of my heart straight to Karen's I would say that was it. I was very proud of it for that.”

Karen enjoyed making lists: to-do lists, shopping lists, and even lists of lists. She would often lie awake in bed with a notepad and pencil, planning every detail of the coming day, as she explained to Ray Coleman in 1975. “
My mind starts going
, ‘This has gotta be done, that's gotta be done, you've gotta call this.' Then I find myself with a flashlight in bed writing down about fifty things that have to be done by 10:00 the next morning. It's not the best way to be. It's better to hang loose, but I'm just not that type of person.” According to friends, she also made tangible lists of attributes she was looking for in a prospective husband and was not willing to settle for anything less than her own preconceived ideal. “
It's really hard
to meet people in this business,” she told
People
magazine. “But I'll be damned if I'll marry somebody just to be married.”

“What are the requirements you're looking for today, Karen?” she was asked during a 1976 interview.

“
Well, I have my list
here,” she joked, “but I'll have to stand just in case it hits the floor!” Little did the interviewer know she had actually put pen to paper to list her requirements in a man. She valued independence and desired a relationship with someone who would understand and appreciate the challenges of her career. “Obviously I would want to cut down on the work,” she said, “but you don't have to get married and sit in the house. I couldn't. There's no way I would ever stop singing or performing or doing whatever I want to do. But I want to do it with somebody and share it. I want somebody to share my joy with.”

She answered the same question for another journalist later that year: “
I want a husband
who can accept my success, because I could not give
it up and stay at home all day. He must also be pretty well off. I don't want to fight the fear of a man having to live with my money. I've seen that ruin too many marriages. And it's got to be somebody dominant because I am far too domineering myself. I'm a bulldozer. . . . So far nine out of ten of them haven't lasted. I know instantly whether it's going to work out. Most of the men I go out with panic on sight. They become scared to death of me. They're envious of my car or they get upset if we go into a restaurant where I might be recognized. . . . So where is the right guy? Still, I'll say one thing: When I marry it will be for good.”

From 1976 on, Karen named “I Need to Be in Love” as her favorite Carpenters song. “
It really hits me
right at home,” she said. “Certain nights on the stage it really upsets me. I sing it and I'm almost putting myself into tears.” Despite its beauty, the single fell short of the Top 20, coming in at #25. An obvious choice for its follow-up was “Can't Smile Without You,” which went on to become a smash hit for Barry Manilow in 1978. Instead it was overlooked in favor of “Goofus,” the final single culled from
A Kind of Hush
. Peaking at #56, it was the Carpenters' lowest-charting single of their career to that point.

B
UILDING ON
changes established by Terry Ellis during his brief stint as interim manager, Jerry Weintraub set out to completely revamp the Carpenters' stage show, which had followed roughly the same format since 1974. “
When we first
went on the road, all we really cared about was reproducing our record sound,” Karen said. “We got that; it sounded just like the record. We didn't care or we didn't know it was also important to perform or be in this showbiz thing.”

In addition to the writing and directing team of Ken and Mitzi Welch, Weintraub brought in famed Broadway choreographer Joe Layton, who felt that the Carpenters had played the role of good musicians for too long. There was no need to replicate the recordings in concert for the same fans that had their records at home. “Layton was a genius,” explains Michael Lansing, who joined the Carpenters as a roadie in 1976. “With Ken and Mitzi, Joe produced a new show under Weintraub's creative hand, and they threw everything out the door.”

Karen's drumming became more of a novelty than ever before with the addition of a lengthy drum spectacular. “She would run from one drum to the other without missing a beat,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “The people would just scream!” The addition of a portable raked stage allowed the entire setup to be angled toward the audience. “
It is just drums
,” Karen explained. “I don't sing a note. We end up with twenty-three drums on the stage. I love to play and I love to sing, but I wouldn't want to give either one of them up.” For this percussion feature Karen often donned a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt with the words
LEAD SISTER
across the front. She'd earned this nickname in 1974, after a Japanese journalist mistakenly referred to her as the “lead sister” rather than “lead singer.”

Despite her love of drumming, Karen had without a doubt emerged as the voice and face of the Carpenters. Most who witnessed the professional relationship between her and Richard recall it as more of an artist-producer relationship than a duo. This might have been the appropriate juncture in their careers for Karen to have received solo billing with Richard maintaining his behind-the-scenes role as producer. Instead, the campaign to establish an equality of importance between the two continued, most notably on stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the emcee, “Mr. Richard Carpenter.” As Terry Ellis had suggested a year before, Richard opened the show alone, entering to a roll of timpani and an orchestral overture in which he took the baton at center stage as conductor. In addition, a large mirror was hung just above his piano and angled so that the audience could watch as his hands move up and down the keys. “You want to make sure you watch that mirror,” Agnes instructed Evelyn Wallace as the family awaited the start of a show in Las Vegas.

“What mirror?” Evelyn asked.

Wallace would never admit it to Agnes, but she saw absolutely no need for the mirror and, in fact, found it to be narcissistic. “People went to see
Karen
,” she says. “The audience went to hear
Karen's voice
, not to watch Richard play some song he had written.”

But even Karen strongly disagreed. Second only to her mother, she was Richard's biggest fan. “
He's so talented
that it makes me weep that everybody just walks right by him,” she told Ray Coleman in 1975,
by which time she was part of the latest effort to establish Richard as the genius behind the Carpenters' sound. “They never give him any credit, but he does everything. He's the brain behind it and yet I get cracks like ‘What does the brother do?' Or I get the impression that it's really nice that I've brought my brother on the road. . . . I really get upset for him because he's so good and he never opens his mouth. He just sits back and because I'm the lead singer I get all the credit. They think I did it, and all I do is sing. He's the one that does all the work. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for him to give him the perfection that we both want.”

Regardless of the overwhelming love and mutual respect between the siblings, Richard could not help but become jealous of the fuss the record-buying public and concertgoers made over his sister. “
Karen is the star
,” he had explained in 1973. “She's the one who gets the letters and requests for autographs. I don't get much attention. Everyone's mostly interested in Karen. She's the lead singer and the featured part of the act. My end is selecting material, arranging, orchestrating, production, names of the albums, selecting personnel for the group, the order of the show, and how to improve the show. The audience doesn't realize what I do. They don't know I've written several hit songs. It's always Karen, which is fine. It's the same way with Donny and the Osmonds. But to me, I know what I've done. Even though a lot of people and critics don't like it, the fact is it's very commercial. It's well produced and it feels nice to me that I selected an unknown song and made it a hit. That makes me feel good, and sure, it feeds my ego.”

The habitual tribute to the oldies remained a part of the new stage show, although it was sometimes exchanged in favor of a medley of songs from the popular Broadway musical
Grease
. In this sequence, Richard tore onto the stage on a motorcycle, and Karen entered wearing pink spandex, a bouffant wig, and an overstated fake bust. New to the show was a grandiloquent Spike Jones–inspired parody of “Close to You,” complete with kazoos and pot and pans. Karen loved the dramatics added to their new show. “
We're hams
,” she told Ray Coleman while in Germany in 1976. “We enjoy dressing up and the production. Have we gone over the top? Well, the answer's in the audience; it's been well received so far. Ask me next year.”

Most shocking was the finale of “We've Only Just Begun,” in which Richard left his fixed stance behind the piano to join Karen at center stage, an effort on the part of the writers to, again, balance his importance with hers. “
They pretend for a
split second to be lovers, looking straight into each other's eyes,” explained Ray Coleman in his review of one of their German concerts. “A rarely seen moment of near passion from a brother-sister act not noted for warmth, in spite of the romantic beauty of their songs. . . . I felt the flesh creep uncomfortably at the sight of grownup brother and sister acting out this slightly incestuous scene as just ‘part of the act.'” The positive side to their “mindboggling” performance, according to Coleman, was that the duo finally seemed to have “planted the kiss of life on a two year old corpse and that their audacity has won. Their 1974 show was boring. The 1976 show is over-ambitious. . . . The new show forces a reaction. Nobody sleeps during this concert. The Carpenters are alive and well—and working hard, as always. They know no other way.”

Calling the music “
polite plastic pop
,” British critic Mike Evans was also unmoved by all the over-the-top attempts at entertaining. “The curtain went up on a tinseled shrine to American kitsch, a mini Las Vegas, all red lights and glitter,” he wrote. The songs were “flawlessly sung and expertly performed with hardly a trace of emotion in the whole performance.”

Perhaps Karen and Richard were working too hard. The new show had been scripted by the Welch duo, and every word and gesture—even the ad libs—were written out and rehearsed to robotic perfection. “Theatrics Overshadow Carpenters' Music” was the headline following a concert at Oklahoma University's Homecoming. “
They were not only
tied down by a script, they were bound and gagged by it. . . . It is unfortunate that they got saddled with the Pollyanna image early in their careers and have decided to cater to it.”