Little Girl Blue (34 page)

“
There was one album
that I remember from the day I was born,” Karen said. “It was Spike Jones's Christmas album. There are some zany things on there. . . . Spike Jones was a master at zany stuff. A lot of people don't know that it takes more talent and more perfection to pull off crackpot things than it does to do a lot of serious things. . . . This album was a combination of nutty and serious. We grew up with that album and just loved it to death.”

Since signing with A&M Records in 1969, Karen and Richard had wanted to record a Christmas album of their own. They both loved the Christmas season and the abundance of great holiday music, but due to touring and recording schedules they had only been able to fit in two seasonal offerings over the years, “Merry Christmas, Darling” in 1970 and “Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town” in 1974. In preparation for
The Carpenters at Christmas
, their second special for ABC-TV, recording sessions commenced in August 1977. It was quickly decided that these recordings would serve as the foundation for an entire album of Christmas music to be released in conjunction with the television special's airing.

The early Spike Jones recordings proved to be the inspiration for Richard, who admittedly patterned much of this project after the
Xmas Spectacular
LP both he and Karen had enjoyed so much as children. They immediately set out to hire Jud Conlon to do their arrangements, only to find that he'd died in 1966. Their next call went to Peter Knight. It was Knight, along with veteran arranger Billy May, who helped bring the concept to life with the help of an eighty-piece orchestra and seventy-voice choir. A five-minute overture of nine selections was orchestrated with the strings, making way for the grand entrance by Karen's voice.

Frosted window panes, candles gleaming inside

Painted candy canes on the tree

Santa's on his way, he's filled his sleigh with things

Things for you and for me

Sammy Cahn's festive lyric for “The Christmas Waltz” was the perfect match for Karen's warm delivery, which melted into a creative rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” Lesser-known titles like “It's Christmas Time,” “Sleep Well, Little Children,” and “The First Snowfall” were culled from the Spike Jones album. Arranger Billy May, who had previously lent his talents to the Carpenters'
Horizon
in 1975, was responsible for helping re-create the Spike Jones charts in a way best suited to Karen's vocal range. This included the pairing of songs like “Winter Wonderland” and “Silver Bells” in an unforgettable medley with “White Christmas.”

It became obvious that there was not time to complete and release the album prior to the airing of the 1977 television special. As a consolation, A&M released “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” as a special holiday single that year. Karen's is one of the only performances of the tune that truly rivals the warmth and presence of Nat “King” Cole's classic recording. In the same vein were “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “I'll Be Home for Christmas,” two songs so identified with Judy Garland and Bing Crosby, respectively. Surrounded with the choral and orchestral sounds of a glorious 1940s MGM musical, Karen was as natural and at home with these songs as either a Judy or a Bing. The songs took on new ownership in the capable, worthy hands of Karen Carpenter.

Recording continued off and on between other sessions, tours, and television tapings, and the Carpenters spent a total of fourteen months producing what became
Christmas Portrait
. Midway through the process they took their Christmas selections to the Las Vegas stage at the MGM Grand, complete with a huge tree and nearly eighty musicians. Their usual Vegas orchestra was augmented with a twenty-four-voice choir.

Construction of the album continued in the New Year. “Merry Christmas, Darling” was by then a recurrent holiday favorite on the radio, but Karen was never pleased with the huskier sound from the lead vocal recorded when she was only twenty years old. Her voice had
matured and developed immensely, so she opted to re-record “Darling” in 1978, as she had done with “Ticket to Ride” in 1973. The Carpenters also took time to record several nonfestive songs amid the Christmas sessions, including “When I Fall in Love” and “Little Girl Blue” for their 1978 ABC-TV special
The Carpenters—Space Encounters
. The tunes were so similar in style that only the latter was included. “When I Fall in Love” was later included in their 1980 special,
Music, Music, Music
.

The sacred selections intermingled with the secular on
Christmas Portrait
included “Christ Is Born,” a lovely musical setting Richard first heard on
The Perry Como Christmas Album
in 1968, the traditional carol “Silent Night,” and the vocally demanding Bach-Gounod version of “Ave Maria.” Karen's love for the Christmas season and its music was always evident when asked about the album, which was planned for a double LP set at one point. “
To sing these songs
is something that gives me more pleasure than I can really put into words,” she said. “I think we came out with something like twenty-nine songs. We've got at least another twelve in the can that we couldn't finish. . . . We were dying because we couldn't stuff them on the record. We'd have had to leave the label off!”

In contrast with
A Kind of Hush
and
Passage
, reviews for
Christmas Portrait
were overwhelmingly positive. “
They've synthesized everything
to ever come out of Sunset Boulevard at Yuletide into two sides of a perfect piece of plastic,” wrote James Parade of
Record Mirror
. “[I]t will bring you Disney, Snow White and her snow, whiteness whiter than white, sleighbells . . . shimmering strings, snowflakes scurrying, ring-ting-tingling, jingling and lots more besides. . . . Buy this record for instant atmosphere and have yourself a merry little Christmas.”

Christmas music was the ideal showcase for Karen Carpenter, and in many ways her renditions were the perfect union of songs and singer. “
Christmas Portrait
is really
Karen's first solo album, and it should have been released as such,” explained Richard in 2004. “But I don't believe A&M would have been too keen on that, especially since no conventional album had been released by us that year.”

A
GNES
C
ARPENTER
was a worrier. She had trouble getting to sleep each night and had sought the help of a doctor in the early 1970s. “When she'd go to bed, she'd think about what she had to do or things that had been done that shouldn't have been done,” explains Evelyn Wallace. “She'd always have something on her mind. She couldn't get to sleep, so they had to give her something strong.”

Agnes first noticed Richard's state of exhaustion and inability to sleep in the fall of 1971 after the group returned home from their European tour. He was worried about completing their next album,
A Song for You
, in the allotted time. “
I was up
just about every night,” he recalled in 1988. “I wasn't getting any sleep, and I did not look too hot when I stepped off the plane. I'd never had a pill before or since except for this. I was really in need of some sleep and quite nervous and concerned.”

Quaaludes were prescription sedatives commonly used to treat insomnia at the time, and Richard did not hesitate when his mother offered them to help him sleep. “
Taken properly they were
a very good pill,” he later explained. “She took them until they discontinued them—one a night the way you're supposed to. She never had any problem with them.”

For a number of years, Richard took the quaaludes as directed. “It was very difficult to sleep on the road,” recalls Maria Galeazzi, who began taking quaaludes with Richard during their romance. “I just sort of bummed off of him. It wasn't every night. It was now and then when he couldn't sleep.”

According to Evelyn Wallace, “If Richard didn't go to sleep the minute he hit the pillow, he'd get up, and he'd end up fooling around at the piano or get something to eat in the kitchen. Those wear off after a while if you keep busy enough. He'd go up to bed, but he still wasn't sleepy. He'd take another one and sometimes a third one. He was just taking too darn many of them.” Richard found that he enjoyed the high the quaaludes gave him—a convenient but risky side effect of sorts—but he was never much of a party animal. For some time he knew nothing about the use of quaaludes as a recreational drug, but the more he took, the longer it would take for the drug's effects to wear off.

Gradually Richard became more and more severely addicted. As his condition worsened his playing began to suffer, and he lost all confidence in his abilities as a pianist. By late 1978 the addiction had taken hold. Disguising the problem became more difficult for Richard because his speech was slurred, and he could barely sign his name because he was unable to hold a pen in his trembling hands. This meant that playing certain intricate piano parts was out of the question. “
One side of me
was saying, ‘You fool! You're killing yourself, you can't function and you're letting your sister and parents down,'” he wrote a decade later in
TV Guide
. “But the other side convinced me I couldn't get by without those pills. . . . I tried a couple of detox programs, but even if you get the stuff out of your system, it's hard to lick the problem. By 1978 I was in trouble, no two ways about it.”

Richard hit rock bottom in September when they played the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He spent most days in bed or dealing with anxiety issues and panic attacks. He would emerge early in the evenings, just long enough to do the show. All he could think about was getting off the stage and going back to bed, where the vicious cycle continued. It was between performances on Monday, September 4, that Richard abruptly informed the band and their crew that he was quitting.
“
That's it
,” he said. “I'm not playing another night.” Although it was never Richard's intention, this run at the MGM Grand would prove to be the Carpenters' last professional engagement, save a few public appearances in 1981. Even then, the band reunited only to mime their instrument playing while Karen and Richard lip-synched to their studio recordings.

Los Angeles session singer Walt Harrah, who was brought in to fill in for band member Dan Woodhams after a serious automobile accident, was disappointed to see his stint with the Carpenters end prematurely. “I did their last MGM show where Richard just quit,” he recalls. “It was a two-week engagement of something like twenty-eight shows, and he quit after four or five days. I guess he was sick of it. He was very private. He was very aloof and alone and kind of depressed, but so was Karen. It could have had to do with her physical condition. She looked like a Holocaust victim.”

With Richard dealing with his addiction and the aftershocks felt from his swift termination of the group's Vegas gig, the last thing he wanted to do was prepare for another appearance. Yet the Carpenters were on the bill for a concert with Frank Pooler, his choir, and the university orchestra. The show was to be held December 3, 1978, in the Pacific Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center with proceeds benefitting the Carpenters Choral Scholarship Fund at California State University Long Beach. As the date approached, Richard began removing songs from the program when he realized he was unable to perform them. “
My hands were shaking
too much,” he explained some years later. “I told Karen I was dropping ‘It's Christmas Time' because I didn't think it would go over well. And I told her I was dropping ‘The Nutcracker' because I didn't think the university orchestra could cut it. I pared that damn program down to almost nothing because I couldn't play most of it. Poor Karen. She was buying all of this, even though she knew I had a problem.”

The Carpenters took the stage late in the show that Sunday afternoon with guest conductor Doug Strawn leading the choir and orchestra. Karen's entrance on “Sleep Well, Little Children” was uneventful, and Richard was incapacitated. He did manage to fulfill his promised
rendition of themes from
Close Encounters of a Third Kind
and
Star Wars
, a medley somewhat out of place in the context of a Christmas performance.

“
The Carpenters finally arrived
on the stage far too late in the show to make much difference, and stayed for too short a time,” wrote Charles Carney in his review for the
49er
, a student newspaper. “Their presence should either have been established during the early portion of the show and woven throughout, or extended for a longer time at the end. As it was, their arrival broke the carefully designed momentum that had been building during the first two-thirds of the show and catapulted it into the predictability of a Las Vegas lounge act.” The Carpenters' lackluster appearance in Long Beach was saved only by Karen's rich and warm tones on “Merry Christmas, Darling” and “Silent Night” and a performance of “Ave Maria” rivaling that of the album version.

During the following week, Karen and Richard were scheduled to depart for London, where they were set to appear on
Bruce Forsyth's Big Night
on BBC rival ITV. Richard was in no condition to perform, much less travel overseas. He was practically bedridden and tried to convince Karen that these promotional appearances in London could wait, even though two new albums,
The Singles 1974–1978
and
Christmas Portrait
, had just hit the UK market. “We're going!” she told Richard, determined to follow through with the engagement.

Arriving at the group's rehearsal space in North Hollywood, Karen was met by the band members but not Richard. She called him immediately and discovered he was still in bed and refusing to make the trip. When she visited him later that day, Richard explained how his addiction had gone too far. Although she was aware of his condition, he had always made excuses and she'd usually believed him. “
You get pretty devious
,” he later recalled. “The same way anorexics do. But it finally got so bad that I couldn't get out of bed, and I had to say, ‘Karen, I've got a problem here.'”