Little Girl Blue (33 page)

“I Just Fall In Love Again” was an obvious choice for single release from
Passage
, but it was too much in the vein of the traditional Carpenters love song formula, complete with oboe interludes and a fuzz guitar solo. They seemed to consciously move away from such predictability with this album, which incidentally contained no original material. Canadian singer Anne Murray, herself a pop-country crossover, had a Top 20 hit with “I Just Fall in Love Again” the following year.

Passage
was the first Carpenters album to be released without any photographs of Karen and Richard, a stark change from their usual smiling portraits. Even the trademark “Carpenters” logo appeared only on the lower portion of the back panel. Popular Los Angeles illustrator
Lou Beach, commissioned to do the
Passage
artwork, was given the title and free reign. “I was exploring the limits of the new color Xerox machines,” recalls Beach. “That art came out of a session at the copy center. It was the best-paying record cover job I'd ever had.”

While the Carpenters considered
Passage
to be a creative success, commercially it flopped, becoming their first album to fall short of gold status. Ardent Carpenters follower Ray Coleman had felt the duo's two previous albums were inferior, but he proclaimed that
Passage
was an “indecisive” career low. “
After all these years
of admiring their excellence, we have come to expect something special from Carpenters albums,” Coleman wrote in his review for
Melody Maker
. “This one just will not do. . . . Karen's melting vocals—always their most powerful asset—are lost when they tackle “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” and “Don't Cry For Me, Argentina.” . . . It's a tragic comment on such talent, but Carpenters fans can safely ignore this release; let's wish them a speedy return to musical decisiveness.”

Often accused of not allowing the Carpenters the necessary studio time to produce a quality album, former manager Sherwin Bash explained the duo's need for patience once their records sales took a downturn. “
Too many artists forget
that you don't have to do everything in five years,” he said. “But you can space it out and take your time. Take time to recharge those batteries and sit down and think about the next album. If you're going to write it, you're lucky to come out with an album every one or two years. In today's life, even if it isn't for three years the world won't forget. The world doesn't need another album, they only need
great
albums. I could never convince Richard of this.”

Karen was fiercely proud of the material she and Richard recorded and was troubled by discouraging reviews, especially from those who had long been on their side. “
In this business
you've not only got to prove yourself but you've also got to prove them wrong,” she had declared in 1976.

Luckily, the Carpenters' presence on the international music scene was strong, with “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” becoming a huge hit in Japan and “Sweet, Sweet Smile” a smash in Germany. But the fickle American audiences left Karen and Richard scrambling
to produce something they would buy. “
We just don't know
what Top 40 radio is looking for,” Karen told
Radio Report
. “One minute they say they're looking for a traditional Carpenters record. We give them one of those and they don't want it. They say they want something different, so we give them ‘Occupants' and they don't want that either. We give them country and Top 40 again resists. If somebody would just let us know what the problem is, then we could take it from there. Everybody has a different answer.”

Karen was unable to separate these professional discouragements from her personal life. She was so focused on achieving and succeeding in the outside world that her inner world and inner beauties were not valued. Although she claimed to want nothing more than a traditional family life with a husband and children, business came first. In fact, when interviewed in 1975, she told Ray Coleman that if it came to a choice between private life and fame, hers would be fame. “
We're very dedicated
to our business,” she said. “Our life is our music, creating it. We try to do everything with as much perfection as we can. We have certain beliefs, certain loyalties to ways of doing things.”

“She was very, very career conscious,” recalls Olivia Newton-John. “It was very important to her, she took it very seriously and she took it personally. I'd always had relationships and boyfriends. To me, my career wasn't the be-all and end-all of life, but for her it pretty much was at that point.”

“
Y
OU ARE
the Perry Comos
of today,” Jerry Weintraub told the Carpenters. Yet another aspect of Weintraub's visions involved bringing the duo into American living rooms via television. He felt this was a sure way to guarantee permanence for their careers. From specials featuring performers such as Como, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Petula Clark to regular series starring performers such as Judy Garland, Tom Jones, Sonny and Cher, and Glen Campbell, musical variety shows were a staple of American television in the 1960s and 1970s.

At first, Karen and Richard were unconvinced. Their 1971 summer series
Make Your Own Kind of Music
had been a disaster in their opinions,
primarily due to a lack of control over the sketch material. “
We stayed away from television
for quite a few years until we signed with Jerry Weintraub, at which point he got us our own shows,” Karen said. “That's really what we needed. We needed to have full control of what we wanted to put and present on television.”

After negotiating a deal with ABC-TV program director Fred Silverman in 1976, Weintraub formed Downey-Bronx Productions with the Carpenters to produce their television specials and remained actively involved throughout the production. He attended most rehearsals and tapings, offered feedback, and made suggestions to director Bob Henry. “Jerry was always an extra set of eyes and ears looking out for Karen and Richard,” remembers Jerry Jaskulski, associate producer for several of the Carpenters' specials. “Bob Henry was in charge overall, and they trusted him when it came to the visual presentation of the show. They were always kept aware of all planning and did have veto power if they didn't like something. Richard was certainly in charge of making the musical decisions. Karen could be demanding when it came to her own performances, as she should have been. She also had a great sense of humor. The mere fact that she chose to play the drums shows that she enjoyed letting loose.”

After three weeks of intense rehearsals with guest stars John Denver and Victor Borge,
The Carpenters' Very First Television Special
was taped September 30–October 2, 1976. The December 8 airing came in at #6 for the week in the Nielsen ratings and garnered an offer from ABC-TV for additional specials on the network. For their 1978 holiday television special,
The Carpenters: A Christmas Portrait
, Karen and Richard were joined by legendary song and dance man Gene Kelly and other guests. “By the time we did that special they were certainly more relaxed and familiar with the routine,” says associate producer Jerry Jaskulski.

Karen agreed, saying, “
Each one, in our opinion
, has gotten better because you grow. You learn very quickly in television how to do certain things and what you do and what you can pull off and what you can't pull off. There are a lot of things that time doesn't permit you to do the way you want to. If it were up to us we'd spend a week just recording, but you can't do that with television. Luckily, we've come off as
close to perfection as we have attempted. Some things we had to let go against our judgment. On the whole we've been real, real happy. We've had the opportunity to work with so many, many good people.”

Guest stars on the television specials ran the gamut from legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Gene Kelly to Grade B stars including Jimmy and Kristy McNichol, Suzanne Somers, and John Davidson. While the comedic efforts were entertaining in moderation, the writing was poor to say the least. “
The Carpenters should have
demanded better scripts, guest stars, sketch ideas, and staging concepts,” wrote Paul Grein in a 1991 reassessment of the duo's work. “If they didn't have the power to make those demands, they should have.”

Hindsight reveals a number of poor choices in terms of scripts and scenarios. Given Karen's history with an eating disorder, it was a bizarre decision by producers to stage one of her song sequences in a kitchen wearing an apron. “I've found over the years the best way to get a party going is to make sure that people have enough food to eat!” From there Karen went from appliance to appliance, all the while singing and dancing—and baking. “The reason we chose to have Karen in a kitchen environment was to present her to be more like one of the girls,” Jerry Jaskulski says. “We wanted to show her as a typical family member and make it easier for the women in the audience to relate to her. Prior to that they had only seen her singing and playing the drums. We all knew Karen had an eating problem, but no one ever thought it would end so tragically.”

Unfortunately the producers' narrow-mindedness meant Karen usually portrayed one-dimensional caricatures during their television specials. Her dialogue lacked depth, and as a result she often came across as gullible or naive, at times even a little ditzy. Richard loathed the attempts at comedy and later regretted the emphasis on those sketches and their canned laughter over higher-caliber musical routines. But Karen was the star, and she seemed to enjoy these productions, which gave her the opportunity to sing, dance, drum, and even try her hand at acting, which sparked her interest in starring in a movie. “
It's something I would
really like to do,” she said in 1978. “I love to act and sing. I'm not sure how or when but I'd like to do a musical.” In fact, Karen
had hinted at this idea as early as 1971, evidenced by this A&M Records press release.

As for Karen, the far-flung future (“at least five years from ‘now'”) holds possibilities of singing and acting in a musical comedy. “I've always loved Broadway-type musicals like
Camelot
,
Finian's Rainbow
and
The King and I
. I'd like to do something like that, eventually.” With her vibrant beauty, her electric stage appeal and her voice—which definitely blends pure sweetness with a hunt of sophisticated sultriness—this seems like another dream that could well be gloriously realized. For the Carpenters, dreams seem to turn to reality with the snap of their magical fingers.

Karen loved female comedians like Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller, and even more dramatic actresses like Barbra Streisand, who had seen much success with musicals like
Funny Girl
and
Hello, Dolly!
“
Streisand just floors me
,” she said in 1976, just two months prior to the release of Streisand's
A Star Is Born
. “She's so good. I would like to do something like that.”

The natural comedian in Karen was evident to all who knew her. “She was really droll,” says Carole Curb. “She made everybody laugh with this amazingly witty and sarcastic sense of humor.” According to Frenda Franklin, “Karen did the best Barbra Streisand imitation you've ever heard in your life. She really, really could have been an actress. She wanted to act. She even wanted to study acting. Today it seems as though everybody wants to do everything in the business, but in those days if you sang, you sang. You were lucky that you got the opportunity to sing. But Karen wasn't looking at it like, ‘Oh, I want to be a movie star.' She just knew that she had something else to offer.”

I
N THE
fall of 1956 during a visit to the Music Corner, one of New Haven's popular record shops, Harold Carpenter had purchased Spike Jones's
Xmas Spectacular
album for his children. It was an odd and varied mix of trademark Spike Jones novelty songs and serious choral music
arranged by Jud Conlon. A progressive vocal arranger at the time, Conlon came onto the scene in the 1940s and is often credited with pioneering the tight, close harmony sounds used in popular music at the time. He and his “Rhythmaires” backed Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and others on a number of popular recordings.