Little Girl Blue (26 page)

Although she usually tried to steer clear of personal matters involving her employers, Wallace immediately recognized the parallels between this girl's story and Karen's, and she was alarmed. She went to Agnes with the magazine and read the article aloud. “I think Karen has what this little girl did,” she told her. “Really, someone should be
doing
something about it or she'll end up the same way.”

Evelyn did not feel it was her place to confront Karen on the matter but suggested to Agnes that Karen might need to see a doctor before the matter worsened. “I didn't want [Karen] to be angry with me and get the idea that I was trying to play doctor, and so I never mentioned the article to her. I showed it to Agnes and told her it was up to her.” The magazine remained on the parents' bedside table for several weeks. “I don't think she ever showed it to Karen.”

Cherry Boone O'Neill, oldest daughter of entertainer Pat Boone and member of the singing Boone Family, was suffering in a manner
very similar to Karen. “I had never heard the term ‘anorexia' or even the phrase ‘eating disorder' until I was twenty years old in 1974,” she says. “When I was seventeen, our pediatrician said he had seen people with my condition before and would have to hospitalize me if I didn't gain weight, but he never mentioned the name of the condition at that point. Finally, after struggling with both anorexia and bulimia for years and thinking that I was an isolated freak, I read an article in a news magazine that described anorexia and bulimia, and it made me realize I was not the only one struggling with these problems. The article didn't really tell me how to overcome my challenges, but it made me feel less alone, and it gave my condition a name. It identified the enemy.”

By the time Karen's weight dropped to near ninety pounds, she looked for ways to disguise the weight loss, especially around those she knew would make comments or pester her to eat more. She began to layer her clothing, a strategy Sherwin Bash noticed in the early part of 1975. “She would start with a long-sleeved shirt and then put a blouse over that,” he explained, “and a sweater over that and a jacket over that. . . . With all of it you had no idea of what she had become.” But Evelyn Wallace was shocked when she caught a glimpse of Karen's gaunt figure as she sunbathed topless in back of the Newville house one afternoon. “They put this screen around her so nobody else could see her,” Wallace explains. “She
loved
to go lay out in the sunshine. I don't know whether it was to get a tan or get away from her mother. Anyhow, I happened to go out to the kitchen for something and I saw her out there. She just had on her little bathing suit shorts. You couldn't tell whether it was a girl or a boy. She had absolutely no breasts.”

I
N
F
EBRUARY
1975 Karen met Terry Ellis, a friend of Ed and Frenda Leffler. Ellis had formed the British record label Chrysalis in 1969. Although he was based in London, where he helped guide the careers of Jethro Tull, Leo Sayer, and others, Ellis had recently bought a home in Los Angeles and was working to expand his label's presence in America. With the intent of matchmaking, Frenda introduced the two over dinner. As Ellis recalls, “I was a single guy, she was a single girl. Frenda
said, ‘You two lovely people should meet!' I liked Karen a lot on that first meeting. It was very difficult
not
to like Karen.”

Karen was equally enthralled. Thirty-two-year-old Ellis was tall, with long, sandy blond hair to his shoulders and striking facial features. “He was
very
handsome,” recalls Frenda. “He was a bon vivant. He drove a Bentley and was a man about town. He was just private jets all the way.”

The dinner date with the Lefflers became the first of many, and a new relationship soon blossomed. According to Ellis, “We liked each other, made contact later, and started to see each other.” Ellis observed that, unlike the rest of the Carpenter family, Karen was quite demonstrative and seemed to thrive on physical touch. “She was very loving and tactile, and she
loved
to be hugged.” Those close to the couple sensed a strong chemistry between the two. Most important to Karen was that Richard approve of the man in her life, and he did. He and Terry Ellis quickly became friends.

Early in their relationship, Ellis encouraged Karen to take some time off to rest and relax with him on vacation in the south of France and on Tortola in the Virgin Islands. Arriving at Ellis's island home, Karen was horrified by a lack of creature comforts. With Terry out of earshot she phoned Frenda to rant about her surroundings. “Frenny, it's hard to believe they've even got
phones
over here,” she said. “There's not even a television set!”

Frenda worried Karen would board the next plane back to Los Angeles. “You could never put Karen anywhere where there wasn't television,” she explains. “She was regimented. Most people would adapt. Not Karen.”

With Ellis's experience and expertise in the field of entertainment management and the record industry in general, it was only a matter of time before he became a part of Karen's professional as well as personal life. “I was an outsider, and it really wasn't my business,” he says, but when he attended his first Carpenters concert he was flabbergasted by the lack of professionalism he witnessed in their stage show. “I watched them perform, and my mouth dropped because she was a terrible performer,” he says. “She hadn't the slightest idea about how to use a stage.
She did everything wrong. She wasn't using her vivacious personality or her wonderful smile. She wasn't using the fact that the audiences absolutely worshiped her. She'd sing a song, and when the guitar player or drummer played a little solo she'd turn her back on the audience and sort of click her fingers and had no interrelation with the audience. Anybody who goes near stage when they're six years old learns that you never, ever, ever turn your back on an audience. I just simply couldn't believe they had so-called top-class management and nobody had taken her by the hand and said, ‘Karen, let's work on your stage show.' They could have hired somebody to produce their show.”

Terry could not hold back. He was an expert in concert construction and was accustomed to evaluating his artists after every show in an effort to continuously better their performances. Back at the hotel, Karen was shocked by his blunt analysis. “Karen, I'm sorry to say this, but you were
terrible
,” he said. “Now, that's the bad news. But the good news is that you're never going to be that terrible again! Tomorrow I'm taking you onto the stage, and I am going to teach you some fundamentals.”

The two walked the stage as Ellis explained that Karen should never stand in front of Cubby O'Brien or Tony Peluso with her back to the audience during their solos. She should face the audience, walk toward them, and interact.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Go to the front of the stage and reach your hand out,” he instructed.

“Well, why should I do that?”

“Well, the audience will like it!”

“Well, what will they do?”

“Well, they'll jump up and they'll hold your hand.”

“No they won't!”

“Yes, Karen, they will. And they will absolutely love it!”

Ellis continued, explaining to Karen that she had ignored the audience members seated in the balcony the night before. “Walk out to the edge of the stage and look up to the people in the balcony and wave at them,” he said.

“Oh, I can't do
that
!”

“Well, yes you can, Karen. They'll love it.”

“And what will they do?”

“They'll
wave back
, Karen!”

“No they won't,” she said. “They won't!”

She argued, but Karen took the stage that night and took command in a way she had never done before. The interaction with the audience was a natural for her, but for some reason she had avoided such communication in the past. “She was like a kid in a candy store,” recalls Ellis. “She discovered something that made life more exciting and more fulfilling.”

As Evelyn Wallace recalls, “All of a sudden, here she was moving her arms and walking from one side of the stage to the other so that everybody could see her. It didn't take her long to realize she had to move around and interact more.”

Karen's sudden on-stage blossoming took Richard by surprise. According to Terry Ellis, he reacted badly to the change in the dynamic, which was curious since it was at his urging that Karen left the drums for the forefront in the first place. “Richard had been so used to being the focus of everybody's attention that it came as something of a shock to him and something he found difficult to handle. It upset him. He couldn't understand why she was getting attention and he wasn't. At one point in Las Vegas, he was having a bit of a rant about how unappreciated he was and that nobody knew what he did—and he wasn't wrong about that. He was the musical genius behind the Carpenters, but nobody was taking any trouble to ensure that he got the credit he deserved. Karen was the focus of attention. She was the girl with the golden voice; the voice of an angel.”

When Ellis arrived in Las Vegas for a series of shows, he discovered Richard was furious after having been introduced as ‘the piano player with the Carpenters' during a panel discussion for
Billboard
magazine. “Have you discussed this with your managers?” Ellis asked. “Are they
doing
anything about it?”

“Well,” Richard said, “no.”

In Las Vegas the Carpenters were augmented by a large orchestra backing their own group. At the beginning of every show the conductor
would lead the orchestra in playing an overture just prior to Karen and Richard's entrance. Ellis made one suggestion to Richard. “Rather than you just shambling onto the stage playing the piano, let's let the audiences know who and what you are. Let's have you come out at the first on the stage and
you
conduct the overture!” In Ellis's opinion, an orchestral conductor was a position of command, responsibility, and authority. “That immediately establishes you as someone who is a bit special and not just the piano player.” Ellis was happy to help but felt he might have overstepped some boundaries in coaching Karen and Richard. He blamed management—particularly Sherwin Bash—for not having addressed these issues much earlier. “Basically, you're both being held back by your manager,” he told them.

“Karen and Richard were kids from Downey, and the show business world was a bit overpowering to them,” Ellis explains. “They were excited and felt very lucky that they seemed to have had some breaks. They had a fairly well-known manager, and they felt they were very fortunate to have him, but he did a terrible, terrible job. There was no career plan. There was no one thinking about the long term prospects for the Carpenters or for Richard or for Karen. I don't think anybody was sitting down with them and saying, ‘Let's talk about your career and work out how we're going to make this last until you're fifty, sixty, or seventy years old.'”

B
Y THE
time
Horizon
saw release in June 1975, two years had passed since the Carpenters' previous studio album. Disappointing to some was its brevity, clocking in at just under thirty-five minutes in duration, but the tremendous advances in sound quality due to new and improved recording techniques prevailed. The debut
Offering
album was completed using only eight tracks, while the Carpenters' next four LPs were recorded on sixteen.
Horizon
was the first to take advantage of A&M's graduation to twenty-four-track recording, and it did not go unnoticed. Stephen Holden of
Rolling Stone
called it their “
most musically sophisticated
album to date,” saying it “smoothly adapts the spirit of mainstream Fifties pop to contemporary taste. . . . Karen Carpenter has developed into a fine vocal technician, whose mellow interpretation
of the Eagles' ‘Desperado' and Neil Sedaka's ‘Solitaire' evidence professionalism on a par with such Fifties stars as Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney. . . . Richard Carpenter has imposed more elaborately orchestrated textures than before and wisely mixed them at a level that doesn't distract attention from Karen's intimately mixed singing.”