Little Girl Blue (29 page)

It was soon obvious to Ellis that Agnes considered him to be a threat to the family's authority over Karen. In fact, the biggest threat was the possibility that he might persuade Karen to go solo and perhaps even
move to England, disbanding the duo and leaving Richard on his own. According to Frenda, Terry did want to make Karen a solo artist and had the capability to do so. “Since he owned Chrysalis Records he could have made that happen. They all just freaked so they started their hatchet job on him.” Ellis disagrees with the idea that he would have encouraged Karen to go solo but agrees that Agnes was on guard. “The family—and by ‘the family' I mean her mother—saw me as a threat to her relationship with Karen and her control over Karen,” he says. “My reading of the situation was that her mother saw me as such a threat that she more or less made Karen choose between me and her.”

Whether or not Agnes sabotaged the love affair was of little relevance. Within no time it became apparent that the social gap between the couple was far too wide. Karen was “in love with being in love,” Frenda claims, “but then when there were demands, like ‘I want you to come live in England,' it just freaked her out. Terry was very continental, and he would have taken her away. That would have been good in the end, but it was too soon for her to jump ship like that. She couldn't have lived in England on his level. It was a world of private jets and islands of Tortola. . . . It was the world she wanted but was not even close to being ready for.”

As much as Karen wanted to be “uptown” she was still very much a middle-class American girl who liked to relax at home in the evening and watch television with her snack on a TV tray. “There were no televisions in that house,” Frenda explains. “You laugh? It was not funny with her.” Within a matter of only a few weeks, Karen became restless in Ellis's palatial Beverly Hills home. “I can't go on like this,” she told Frenda. “I have to get out of here!”

As they would do periodically, the Lefflers came to Karen's rescue, bailing her out in times of great despair. With Ellis out of town, Karen packed her things and left without warning. “She didn't even have the maturity to end that the right way,” Frenda says. “She wanted to have it, but she just didn't have it in her. She just left. She was afraid. We had to go get her. She was pretty broken when she left.” The relationship with Terry Ellis ended as quickly as it had begun, but Karen was too ashamed to face him. Instead, she phoned him shortly after moving out.
“This just can't work,” she told him. “We aren't right for each other, and it's too difficult. We just have to stop seeing each other.”

Ellis sensed this was the work of Agnes and the hypnotic hold she seemed to have over her daughter. “Her mother gave her such hell that she just moved straight back,” he says. “It's difficult to know if that's what Karen wanted or if that's what Karen had to have or what was forced on her by her mother and her family.” He disagrees that Karen was ill prepared for or ill suited to his lifestyle. “When Karen was with me, we traveled somewhat and went to France, and she really enjoyed it,” he says. “When I was with her away from her family she would
come alive
! There was a lot of depth to Karen that you could see privately, but as soon as she got back into the family situation she would change.

“Very early on Harold and Agnes found that Richard had this extraordinary talent. He was a musical genius—no question about that—he was and is, but from the point they realized he had this talent, the whole family's energy was devoted to Richard's career. They moved coasts in order to give him more opportunities, and everybody in the family was told, ‘We have this unique talent in the family,' ‘Richard is a genius,' and ‘We all have to sacrifice in order to insure that he gets the best opportunities to expose his talents.' So at a very early age Karen was told that her job in life was to support Richard. That continued all the way up through their careers until they became huge stars and beyond. If you were to go into the family environment, where I was a lot, there was that same dynamic of ‘Everybody's here for Richard' and ‘It's really Richard who's the star.' Even when Karen had become the star, that dynamic still existed, and she would fall in line.”

Frenda feels certain that Karen was content not being the star of the family. “That wasn't what made her ill, I am positive of that,” she says. “It was just being ignored. That's different. You don't have to be the star, but you can't just be pushed to the side and have no value.”

Karen spoke briefly of her relationship with Terry Ellis in an interview for the
Daily Mirror
. “
We had a thing
going for a while, but we weren't exactly matched. We are still good friends,” she said, but confessed, “I don't think I have ever really been in love,” a comment she would later regret. “Everyone keeps saying that I'll know when it
happens. Well, I'm waiting. Love is something I want very badly to feel. There is nothing more I want out of life right now than to be married and have children. That would be wonderful. But it must happen naturally and, I hope, in the next couple of years.”

As Evelyn Wallace recalls, Agnes relished in welcoming Karen back to Newville with a bit of an “I told you so” attitude. “It's a good thing you came back home,” she told her. But Karen was unhappy. The breakup with Ellis was terribly painful; it was the closest thing to a long-term relationship she had experienced. Not only was it the end of romance, it was the end of the Carpenters' professional relationship with Ellis, and—perhaps most crushing—it was another botched attempt by Karen at breaking free and leaving home. She was twenty-five years old and returning home to live with her parents in Downey, but Karen vowed that this return to Newville would be short-lived. “She really wanted to move out of that house,” Wallace recalls. “I think her mother was getting her down to the point where she wanted out. She wanted to get her own apartment.”

K
AREN SOON
announced plans to move to Century City, where she had purchased her own condominium back in July 1975. The twin twenty-eight-story Century Towers at 2222 Avenue of the Stars overlooked the Hillcrest Country Club and the golf course at Rancho Park. Designed by world-renowned architect I.M. Pei, the gated Century Towers complex was built in 1964 as Century City was being developed out of the backlot of Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Karen bought two adjacent corner units, numbers 2202 and 2203, on the twenty-second floor of the east tower. The first six notes of “We've Only Just Begun” chimed to welcome guests to the luxurious three-thousand-square-foot residence. “It was amazing,” says Carole Curb. “She had one of the top decorators redo it. It was beautiful and reflected the new Karen once she'd made the transition and had the successes and everything.”

“Well, what do you like?” decorator John Cottrell had asked Karen.

“You better sit down,” she cautioned. Karen's decorating tastes were eclectic and a fusion of contemporary, country, and French styles. “I want it to look classy, in a funky kind of way,” she told him. “I want it to be top-notch, top class, yet I want people to feel like they can put their feet up on anything. I don't want it to look [stuffy], yet I want it to be beautiful.”

“Oh dear,” Cottrell said.

In the end, the Lucite- and chrome-accented living room was offset by a country style kitchen. Personalizing Karen's new uptown residence were the many stuffed animals she positioned neatly across the huge bed. The bedroom was designed around an Advent VideoBeam home theater system with a seven-foot-wide screen, just like the one Richard had installed at Lubec Street. Carole Curb recalls that Karen's bedroom closet was a fine example of her friend's quest for perfectionism. “Karen was very, very meticulous,” she says. “The clothes hangers were all the same and a quarter-inch apart. The pants were all together, the blouses all together. It was like an amazing boutique with everything arranged in order.”

Another frequent visitor was fellow singer Olivia Newton-John. She and Karen first met in 1971 at Annabel's, a nightclub in London's Berkeley Square, and over the succeeding years developed a close friendship. “Karen was a very friendly, outgoing girl,” Olivia says. “We hit it off since we are both down-to-earth people. We connected on that level, and we both liked the other's voice. We talked about doing a duet for fun, but it never eventuated because we were both so busy with our own things. We both had such crazy lives that we understood each other. Usually our schedules were so crazy that we just managed to meet for lunch, or I'd go to her place in Century City. Her place was
immaculate
. It was really a very beautiful apartment with the most amazing view. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, she's so lucky. She's got this amazing pad all to herself.' She was very clean, very tidy. Obviously she had issues and probably could have had obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

Interspersed among the chic and stylish decor was Karen's collection of Mickey Mouse and Disney memorabilia. “She had a lot of child in her,” Olivia recalls. “She loved childhood things, she was funny and
she was quirky.” As Karen would often do, she invented several nicknames for each of her closest friends. Olivia was affectionately referred to as Livvy or ONJ (which Karen pronounced Ahhnj). According to Frenda, Karen had nicknames for everything. “The whole
world
was a nickname,” she says. “It was like she actually had her own language. She'd say, ‘Did you talk to the 'rents?' Those were my parents. If you didn't know what she was thinking about, you'd think she was from another country. She'd be fantastic at text messaging!”

Karen's new residence was only a few miles from the Leffler home on Tower Road, and Frenda welcomed her to the neighborhood and helped her establish a new sense of community. At Century Towers there were doormen who took a liking to Karen and made her feel at home. Just around the corner on Pico Boulevard was Owen's, her favorite market. “She made it a little neighborhood,” Frenda says, “like her own little Downey. She loved to go on little errands with me or wherever I went, and she wanted to learn all the nice places for the locals and things that were native to Beverly Hills and Los Angeles.”

When the two entered Edelweiss Candy on Canon Drive, Karen was thrilled to see the candy being hand dipped and made on the premises. She rarely enjoyed such confectionery delights but was fascinated with the preparation and presentation of all types of food. “Oh my God,” she told Frenda. “Now
this
is a candy store!”

J
ANUARY
1, 1976, brought a new contract with A&M Records and the naming of Jerry Weintraub of Management III as the Carpenters' new manager. Weintraub was an entertainment powerhouse whose career began as a talent agent for MCA Records in the 1950s. By the time he came to manage Karen and Richard he had worked with such clients as Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland, in addition to having helped guide John Denver to the enormous success he was seeing by the mid-1970s.

Weintraub's first order of Carpenters business was to map out a plan for the duo with longevity as the foundation. They were primarily a recording group, but prior to 1976 their schedule had left them with
very little time to spend in the studio. Five years of incessant touring had left Karen and Richard burned out, exhausted, and without personal lives. When not on endless tours of one-nighters across the United States they could be found in Europe or Japan for even more concerts, television appearances, and interviews. “
It was sickening
,” Karen told
People Weekly
in a cover story for the magazine. “Suddenly it wasn't fun anymore.”

As the Carpenters' new manager, Weintraub vowed to change the group's direction by limiting the number of concerts they would perform each year and making certain there was plenty of time in the recording studio. Despite these attempts, their next studio album,
A Kind of Hush
, did little to mask the poor health and fatigue that had plagued the duo the year prior. Failing to break into the Top 30 in the United States, it marked the beginning of a descent in their popularity. The title track and debut single was an insubstantial cover of the Herman's Hermits hit and one of two castanet-heavy oldies, the other being Neil Sedaka's “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” Giving a new meaning to the word “oldie” was “Goofus,” written in 1931 and previously recorded by Les Paul, the Dinning Sisters, and Chet Atkins. Calling the album “
an overdose of pretty
,” music critic Joel McNally felt
Hush
was an appropriate title for an album that displayed such little dynamic contrast. “At this point it is the odds-on favorite to win the Grammy,” he joked, “the Nobel Peace Prize and the
Reader's Digest
Sweepstakes.”