Little Girl Blue (4 page)

Harold Carpenter hung swings from the rafters in the basement of the Carpenters' home, a favorite hang-out spot for neighborhood kids when it was too cold to play outside. It was a music haven for Richard, who even designated the area with a sign that read
RICHIE'S MUSIC CORNER
, his version of the family's favorite local record shop. The children would swing in the basement and listen to the music Richard selected from his library, which was categorized, alphabetized, and documented. “Richard had a beautiful sound system,” Bonito recalls. “In those days they were called hi-fi's. He would have music on, and Karen and I would be swinging and doing our homework.”

As she would do for much of her life, Karen took on Richard's interests. Music became their shared passion, and the two would swing to the music for hours. “
I did everything
that Richard did,” she said in a 1981 interview. “If he listened to music, I listened to music. It was unconscious, but because I idolized him so much . . . every record that we've ever listened to is embedded in my mind.” They enjoyed the sounds of Nat “King” Cole, Guy Mitchell, and Perry Como, and both sat spellbound listening to the overdubbed sounds of Les Paul and Mary Ford, particularly on the duo's masterpiece “How High the Moon.” According to Richard, Karen could sing every Les Paul solo. The first record she asked for was “I Need You Now” by Eddie Fisher on RCA-Victor. The two also enjoyed listening to the radio, notably WMGM and Alan Freed's Top 40 show on WINS, “1010 on Your Dial,” out of New York.

Karen liked to dance and by the age of four was enrolled in ballet and tap classes. Prior to recitals she could be found singing and dancing
on the sidewalk in front of the house in a full costume of sequins, satin, tap shoes, and a huge bonnet. Karen was a short, stocky little girl with her dark blond hair cut in a Dutch-boy style. Debbie Cuticello admits to having looked up to Karen, who was two years her senior: “She was my best buddy. I tried to do everything that she did, basically. She was older than I was, and the two years made a big difference back then. Richard was older. You looked up to him, not necessarily a ringleader but the oldest of the group. He and Karen loved each other. . . . There was sibling rivalry—maybe a little pinching here and there—but it was typical; nothing unusual, nothing different.”

While Debbie and Joey Vaiuso attended St. Bernadette School, a Catholic school in the area, Karen was a student at Nathan Hale School, just around the corner from Hall Street on Townsend Avenue. “Karen was a year younger than us,” says Frank Bonito. “She was the youngest in the class and one of the best students in the class. We were very close through sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and we always studied together.” Karen and Frank walked to school each morning and returned home at lunchtime. “It was an era when women didn't work outside the house, so we'd come home,” Bonito says. “There was no cafeteria or anything, so all the kids just went home for lunch. On the way back I'd stop and pick Karen up, and then we'd walk to school together, picking up other friends as we went along.”

Like most little girls who grew up in the 1950s, Karen had the Ideal Toy Company's Betsy Wetsy doll, but she preferred playing with her dog, Snoopy, or her favorite toy machine gun or participating in various sports. A favorite was Wiffleball, a variation on baseball that used a perforated plastic ball invented just thirty miles away by a man in Fairfield, Connecticut. Karen pitched and sometimes played first base. “
I was a tremendous
baseball fan,” she later said. “I memorized all the batting averages long before I knew the first word to a song. The Yankees were my favorites.” She also delivered the
New Haven Register
on her paper route each day, sometimes adding weekend routes for extra money.

Teenage Richard was tall, thin, and gangly, somewhat uncoordinated, and not as physically active as Karen. He spent most of his free time indoors with his music. “
It was slightly embarrassing
,” he recalled.
“Karen was a better ballplayer than I was, and when choosing sides for sandlot games, she'd be picked first.” The school bullies sometimes teased and picked on him. This left him temperamental, and he could be upset quite easily. Richard's rants were short and usually ended with him storming off and back into the house where he remained the rest of the day. Agnes encouraged him to fight back, but she also relied on Karen to watch over her older brother. “
She can take care
of herself and Richard,” Agnes explained in 1972. “When they were little kids, she always defended him. She'd take on all the roughnecks and make them leave Richard alone.”

T
HE
C
ARPENTERS
' dining room was home to the family's piano and therefore one of the highest-traffic areas in the house. The piano was purchased by cousin Joan, by then a teenager, when Richard was eight years old. He grew disinterested after a frustrating year under the direction of the rigid Ms. Florence June, and in a mutual agreement both teacher and parent decided the talent and interest were lacking and the lessons should cease.

Three years later Richard taught himself to play by ear, excelling at flourishes and arpeggios. His parents decided to give it another chance, and he began studying with Henry “Will” Wilczynski, a student from Hartford. This time Richard's interest was sparked and his talent emerged. “During the summer when all the windows were open you would hear Richard play the exercises you have to play,” Debbie Cuticello says. “There was always lots of music coming from that house.”

Neighbor Bill Catalde saw the Carpenter kids in the same light as any others on Hall Street. “In our world we never thought of them as anything but the wonderful kids that they were. We were just children. With the possible exception of Richard, we never really projected ourselves into the future.”

Karen looked up to Richard, his musical talents and intuition, so when he began accordion lessons with Henry Will, she wanted to take lessons as well. Will became a regular around the Carpenter house and soon began courting Joan. Although Karen enjoyed her lessons,
she was more interested in exploring her other hobbies, most notably her fascination with drawing. She won a poster contest while attending Nathan Hale and expressed interest in becoming either an artist or perhaps a nurse.

Seeing their son's natural ability and marked progress, Agnes and Harold invested in a new piano, a black Baldwin Acrosonic. By the age of fourteen, Richard was sure his life would be centered on music in some way. His progress reached a point where Henry Will, who by 1959 had received his music degree from the University of Hartford, felt he could no longer challenge the young pianist. He recommended Richard audition at nearby Yale Music School, where he soon began lessons under the direction of professor Seymour Fink.

H
AROLD
C
ARPENTER
spent years loathing the cold New England winters, which meant shoveling snow and placing chains on car tires before braving the icy roads. He watched the annually televised Tournament of Roses Parade and longed to be in sunny Southern California with its palm trees and mild climate. As early as 1955, he made tentative plans to relocate after a friend of the family who had previously made the move out West himself offered him a job at the Container Corporation of America in California. Instead, the money he saved for the move went to pay for a much-needed mastoid operation.

By 1960 the family's savings allowed Harold, Agnes, and Richard to vacation in Los Angeles, and they used this opportunity to scout out possible sites for relocation. Karen stayed with her aunt Bernice, uncle Paul, and their children to avoid the lengthy car trip. In addition to their quest for a milder climate, the Carpenter parents saw California—and especially Hollywood—as a place where Richard's dreams of becoming a famous pianist would have a better chance of coming true. Anticipating the expense of the pending relocation, Agnes went back to work in 1962. She became one of the top machine operators at Edal Industries, a New Haven rectifier manufacturer.

By early 1963 it was official. Harold sat the family down one evening and announced they would be leaving Hall Street and New Haven
altogether. Richard was ecstatic after having visited Southern California with his parents three years earlier, but Karen was not happy. “She didn't want to leave her friends,” says Frank Bonito. “She had even received scholarships to go to one of the local private schools.” Before leaving New Haven, Karen graduated with the eighth grade class of Nathan Hale School. “Even though it was just a grammar school graduation, they made a big deal about it,” Bonito says. “We had a little dance, and Karen and I made dance cards.” In a class prophecy for the year 2000, Frank was predicted to be the mayor of a city on the moon and Karen to be his wife. “I guess they were wrong,” he says.

In June 1963 the Carpenters filled their car to the brim with only a sampling of their belongings and said good-bye to their cherished friends and neighbors, leaving behind cousin Joan, who married Henry Will that year. “I remember the day that they left in their shiny car,” Debbie Cuticello says. “I remember that day because I was very disappointed. It was a sad day for me. I was very upset. I was losing my best friend, and she was going so far away that I couldn't visit. California was way over on the other side of the world from me. I walked over to say good-bye and brought her a dish filled with macaroni.”

Bill Catalde was also there to watch the Carpenters drive away that summer morning. “I remember a secret pact between Karen and I that we would someday marry,” he says. “I doubt that Karen would have remembered that vow from long ago, but in retrospect we would have probably fared a lot better than what destiny had in store for the two of us.”

U
PON MOVING
to Downey, California, Harold Carpenter started his job as a lithograph printer in the nearby city of Vernon at the Container Corporation of America, where he worked double shifts to earn extra money for his family. Although Karen was upset to leave her friends in New Haven, the Carpenters never regretted their decision to relocate. California was a land of opportunity in many ways, and just as they had hoped, Richard was busy within two weeks of their arrival. Downey also allowed the Carpenter family to maintain a quiet, middle class, suburban way of life, not unlike their New Haven beginnings.

“
Head down the Santa Ana
Freeway, turn off on San Gabriel, make a couple of rights, and you're in Downey, a right-wing, unpretentious suburb of the sprawling conurbation that makes up Los Angeles.” According to British journalist Chris Charlesworth, “It's where the homes are neat and tidy, where the kids graduate from high school, go to college and [play] football so that bruises will stand them in good stead later in life. It's where the moms and dads go to each other's cocktail parties once a week and where they eat TV dinners during the Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9. It's safe and sound.”

Waiting for their New Haven house to sell, the Carpenter family struggled to maintain mortgage payments on the East Coast while renting an apartment in the West. “They were all just struggling like
the rest of us and trying to get by,” says Veta Dixon, who managed the forty-three-unit Shoji complex, located at 12020 Downey Avenue. “The Carpenters were just wonderful, wonderful people. We loved them immediately, and the kids, too. They lived upstairs on the right in #22.”

The family soon moved across the breezeway to #23 when a larger apartment vacated. There they lived directly above a police officer for the City of Downey. When the musical vibrations penetrated the floor, he soon complained to the managers about the sounds coming from upstairs. “Do I have to listen to that piano day and night?” he asked.

“Yes,” Dixon claims to have replied, “and if you don't like it you can move out! One of these days you'll be paying big money to see them and hear their music.”