Little Girl Blue (42 page)

According to Evelyn Wallace, Phil and Itchie wanted more than anything to see Karen's album through to completion for Karen's sake. “They would have done anything to get it done for her, but Richard wasn't willing to give up one minute.” In fact, he had returned to work and even booked studios for various Carpenters-related projects, including their impending “comeback” album. Their
Music, Music, Music
special, which became their final for ABC-TV, was set to air in a matter of weeks, and Karen's album was low on the list of priorities.

According to Phil Ramone, “Once Richard didn't like the album, the traditional response in that family was, ‘We're not going to like it either.' Nobody would jump forward to say, ‘Now wait a minute, this is what Karen wanted to say, and we should accept that.' And once you've put it on the shelf, you've put it on the shelf.” He and Itchie wanted the album on record store shelves and to see Karen singing in clubs and performing concerts to promote her new music. According to Itchie, “The artists who had come forward and supported her thought it was really a strange deal considering who they were and who she was. Once again the attention got focused on Richard, what Richard wanted and what Richard needed.”

Musician Russell Javors was worried to hear of the unenthusiastic response from Richard and A&M. “Poor Karen,” he says. “She was an artist, and she was just trying to work and to explore her craft, and she had every right as an artist to do that. Collaboration is only as good as the sum of its parts, and you have to let each one of those pieces explore what it is that they do. There have to be equal parts. Nobody can be controlling. Karen was every bit as important to those records—if not more so—than the other part. She had the right to explore it. Richard had his own issues at the time. I am sure that he was not thrilled about this project, but if he were in good enough shape to work they would have been working together. Not her with us.”

In a 1993 interview Richard explained how he often felt wrongly accused in the case of the solo album and reaffirmed it was Karen's choice and not his urging that put a stop to the album's release. “
I get the blame
for this, you know,” he said. “People who are ‘anti-Richard / pro-Karen'
seem to take everything that was wrong with Karen and blame it on me. They say that I talked her out of releasing this record because I was ready to start our new album. It was sheer nonsense. All you have to do if you don't believe me is talk to Herb, talk to Jerry, or talk to Derek. . . . They believed that it didn't have any hits on it, and they weren't going to release it. It had nothing to do with me.”

A&M officials agreed unanimously with the album's cancellation. Despite his enthusiasm at the New York playbacks, Derek Green felt the album was “a dog” from a commercial standpoint. “
To everybody's credit
, the record was stopped,” he told Ray Coleman. “The responsibility to the greatest extent with an artist like that would rest with the producer. And it was a mismatch.”

Asked over the years about the album's shelving, Herb Alpert almost always answered with nervous hesitation, choosing his words carefully. According to him, the album did not have an effect on him in the same way that a Carpenters album would. He also described Karen as being indecisive and explained how she would go back and forth between loving and hating the album. Other times he conveniently forgot the details. “
I don't
exactly
remember why, but I'm sure she wasn't real comfortable with it.”

According to Jerry Moss, the men were simply thinking of Karen's best interests. “
We didn't think it
would get a really great reaction,” he said. “We didn't want to have Karen go through that, you know.”

In public and to the press, Karen put on her game face, nonchalantly glossing over the project's demise. “
It's a good album
,” she said in 1981. “It just dragged on so long. It seemed all of a sudden to be getting in the way of us going back to work again. . . . It got to a point where I had to make up my mind because Richard wanted to go back to work and . . . I wanted to go back to work, too, as the Carpenters. . . . I'm sure there would have been people who would have been shocked, and a lot of people who would have loved it. I didn't put it away because I was dissatisfied. We ran out of time.”

“I
WANT
to spend the rest of my life with you,” Tom Burris told Karen two months into their relationship. She was unsure how to interpret
such a declaration so she phoned Karen Ichiuji for advice. Already hesitant to support her friend's blind faith in Tom, Itchie was shocked to learn of the couple's quickly progressing love affair. “I think Tom proposed,” Karen said.

“You don't just
think
,” Itchie said, explaining that a proposal of marriage should never be a vague or indefinite statement.

Karen's uncertainty was resolved a few days later on Monday, June 16, when Tom officially asked her to marry him and presented her with a ten karat pear-shaped diamond ring. Although she had been anticipating the proposal, she did not accept right away. Tom was still married, and his divorce would not be final for another two days. Seeking her mother's advice, she asked, “Should I marry him?”

Agnes offered little assistance, telling her daughter she was old enough to know what she was doing. “That's all up to you,” she said. But Karen knew what she wanted all along. She was under Tom's spell and not about to let this opportunity pass her by. She returned to Tom, accepting his proposal on June 19, the day after his divorce became final. To celebrate their engagement, Burris presented his fiancée with a new Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible to match his own. “Hey Itch!” Karen said, waking her friend with an early morning phone call. “You wanna be a B.M.?”

“A
what
?”

“Tom proposed! We're getting married next year. Do you wanna be a B.M.? You know—a bridesmaid!”

Interestingly, syndicated astrologer Joyce Jillson forecasted Karen's engagement several weeks prior. “
Pisceans have marriage
on their minds . . .,” she wrote in the “Celebrity Trends” portion of her May 21, 1980, column. “Karen Carpenter could announce her engagement under these lucky Piscean aspects.”

The couple's plan for a year-long engagement hastily narrowed when they announced in July their plans for an August ceremony. “They just seemed to want to move quickly,” Carole Curb says. She was shocked but says she felt they were surely old enough to know what they were doing. “I just hoped for the best.”

The push to be married alarmed Karen's friends. According to Itchie, “That's when everybody's antennas went up.” Despite Karen's
excitement over the engagement and fast-approaching wedding, Tom was a stranger to them and one who seemed to be on the fast track to marrying their close friend. Karen assured them of his successes in the world of commercial real estate development and talked about his multiple homes, racecars, yachts, and even an eleven-passenger Learjet, but they sensed something was awry. According to Frenda, “It was like, ‘I-met-you-will-you-marry-me?' Karen was just all caught up with this. Never ever could any of us have anticipated that it was going to be what it really was. . . . What I didn't know was that he didn't have a nickel. I believed the stories she told me. Why wouldn't I? It was coming through reliable sources, Mike and Carole, who are certainly not fly-by-nights.” Frenda doesn't blame the two, however: “Had they known the truth, would they ever have introduced her to this horrendous person? No!”

By this time Karen was determined to be married at any cost, regardless of warnings from loved ones. Without her knowledge, the family hired a private investigator to look into Burris's background. “If only we'd done a better job checking him out,” Frenda says. “His intentions were very clear right in the beginning. This was a plan, but who could have possibly known? Don't think all of us didn't tell her, but when somebody's not listening, they're not listening.”

C
ASTING HER
strong personal opinions of Tom Burris aside, Frenda Leffler set out to assist her best friend in coordinating all things wedding related. Karen wanted her big day to be exactly like those of Frenda and her sister Alana Megdal, who both wed in huge Beverly Hills society events with armies of bridesmaids and groomsmen and every tiny detail executed in the grandest of styles. But with only weeks to organize this magnificent event there was no time to waste.

“Frenda took over right away,” Evelyn Wallace recalls. “She took care of everything.” Agnes Carpenter was upset to discover many of the big decisions had been made without her input. She claimed to have wanted to spend mother-daughter time assisting Karen, but plans were already underway by the time she volunteered. “Usually, when your daughter gets married, you want to be with her and help her,” explains Wallace.
“Agnes did absolutely nothing. Frenda did everything. She helped her get the dress, pick out the cake, and even did the invitations.”

“Showering Karen with Love and Affection” was the theme of a wedding shower thrown by Frenda, by then named as Karen's matron of honor, and bridesmaid Carole Curb. The event took place on Sunday, August 3, and gathered more than a hundred women at the exclusive Hillcrest Country Club bordering Karen's residence at the Century Towers. Olivia Newton-John was in attendance, as was Itchie, who flew in for the weekend with fiancé Phil Ramone. Ramone treated Karen and Tom to a Billy Joel concert that weekend at the Forum in Inglewood, California.

The Hillcrest's clubhouse garden room was decorated in shades of lavender and peach with an abundance of lilies and orchids flown in from Hawaii. “Karen loved a good party,” recalls Frenda. “She was a vision in yellow organdy that day. Like a spring daffodil.” Her two-piece yellow outfit and sun hat were designed by Bill Belew, who was also commissioned to create her wedding gown. Belew had been the costume designer for a number of television specials, including the Carpenters' recent
Music, Music, Music
, for which he would later receive an Emmy nomination.

Maria Galeazzi, Karen's former stylist and Richard's ex-girlfriend, was among the guests at the Hillcrest. She was invited a few weeks earlier when she happened upon Karen as they both were shopping in Beverly Hills. “When I saw her I was shocked,” Maria says, recalling that day on Rodeo Drive. “People said she had lost weight, but I had not seen her. She looked so thin.”

Agnes seemed happy to recognize Maria among the sea of unfamiliar faces at the country club. “Oh, Maria Luisa,” she said. “You have no idea what Richard's been through!”

Agnes was referring to her son's addiction to quaaludes, a problem that Maria witnessed during her time with Richard in the early 1970s. “I didn't go nuts with those pills,” she says. “When I got off the road I didn't take them anymore. I guess he just kept on going. I was shocked to hear that part.” Maria was not nearly as surprised to hear that Richard was still dating his cousin Mary Rudolph. “What do you expect?”
she says. “They'd thrown daggers at everybody he'd hooked up with. Now he had resorted to staying within the family.”

According to friends, Karen was mortified by her brother's involvement with their cousin. Itchie had noticed early on that she was strongly against the relationship. “I thought it was because of the gene thing, but after many confrontations Richard finally just screamed out, ‘For God's sake, we had the tests! They were
fine
. We can have wonderful, healthy children!' Karen just did
not
want Richard to marry her.”

Karen asked Itchie to play matchmaker for Richard on numerous occasions. “It didn't matter what country or what city we were in, she was scrambling for someone for him. I didn't even know Richard when I had to start coming up with these dates for him. Even I was thrown into that mix. She tried to fix Richard and
me
up!”