Little Girl Blue (45 page)

The Carpenters' new album and their contributions to A&M Records were celebrated by Herb Alpert and the entire label on the evening of June 29, 1981, at a party in their honor on the grounds of the Bel Air Hotel. An audience of more than two hundred guests watched as Alpert welcomed Karen and Richard back to the music scene, presenting two matching plaques that displayed their eleven studio albums for A&M. He also announced that the Carpenters' record sales as of March that year had topped seventy-nine million units.

M
ADE IN
America
concluded with “Because We Are in Love (The Wedding Song),” written for Karen's wedding, but by the time the album hit shelves, Karen's marriage was already on its last leg. “She thought she'd married the right guy,” Maria Galeazzi says, “but this one took her for a ride.” Friends of the couple, including Carole Curb, began to hear “bits and pieces that didn't feel good and didn't sound right. I heard that there were some monetary things that popped up with Tom that none of us knew about. That didn't sit right with her. All that glitters isn't gold.”

According to Itchie, Karen had learned the truth of Tom's financial status the morning of their wedding. “They were all in the process of investigating, but there wasn't enough time,” she says. But Karen was more upset to learn of her family's probing and refused to heed the warnings from Werner Wolfen and others. “Artists are prone to fall in love with somebody who can spend their money without them knowing it,” explains Phil Ramone. “Karen was pretty frugal, to say the least. Some of the older-thinking artists watched every penny. The Carpenters had a pretty good money advisor, so I am surprised that Tom got through that fence.”

Most had assumed Burris's lifestyle and net worth were comparable to that of Karen's. The expensive cars and other possessions gave him
the appearance of a multimillionaire, but what others did not realize was that he was living well beyond his means. On several occasions he treated the Carpenter parents and their friends to a short yacht trip around Newport Harbor, even instructing Evelyn Wallace on steering technique. “Oh, I have six boats,” he boasted to her.

“Tom had wanted Karen to think that he was Mr. Money Guy, but it wasn't long after they got married that he started asking her for money,” recalls Wallace. “He'd give her some excuse, and she'd give him the money. He'd ask for $35,000 and $50,000 at a time. Finally it got down to the point where all she had left was stocks and bonds.”

As Itchie recalls, “Tom couldn't afford the houses, the cars, her wedding ring; he couldn't pay for
anything
.” Karen began to share with friends her growing misgivings about Tom, not only concerning his finances but also his lack of feelings for her. He was often impatient, and she admitted being fearful when he would occasionally lose his temper. “He could be very cruel to her,” says Itchie. But Karen's longing to be a mother proved to be stronger than her desire to leave her husband. At the house in Newport Beach Karen expressed to Tom her desire to get pregnant and start a family. Of course a vasectomy reversal would be required, and he had promised to go through with the procedure, but in this particular moment Karen just wanted to be intimate with her husband. She never could have dreamed that his response would be so brutal. She was still crying hysterically when she called Itchie for support. According to Karen, Tom had told her he wouldn't even consider having children with her and called her “a bag of bones.” Karen was well aware that her weight had plummeted since her wedding to Tom the previous year, but hearing such callous words in response to a physical advance toward her husband was unbearable.

Karen and Tom saw their first anniversary come and go with little merriment. During the last week of August the two set out on a journey taking them more than six thousand miles round-trip in Tom's cumbersome four-wheel-drive Dodge Ramcharger, equipped with CB radio and refrigerator. Although the Carpenters rarely toured or traveled in what would be considered excessive luxury, this trip found the Burris couple roughing it, to say the least. Following a stay in the San Juan
Mountains near Durango, Colorado, Karen and Tom schlepped northward. They stopped at Canada's hiking capital, Lake Louise in Banff National Park, before visiting the city of Vancouver. Relieved to return to Los Angeles, Karen recovered from what she considered to have been a disaster of a vacation.

Itchie flew to Los Angeles to find out for herself what was happening in her friend's marriage and offer her love and support to Karen. They met for lunch at their normal hangout, Hamburger Hamlet, but Karen asked the host for a different table than their usual. “We didn't sit at our regular table, which was odd,” Itchie recalls. “We sat in the dark, and she wore huge, dark sunglasses.”

“OK, what do you want me to do, Kace?” she asked, realizing things had gone too far. “You can't go on living like this.”

According to Itchie, this marriage was “the straw that broke the camel's back. It was absolutely the worst thing that could have ever happened to her. She was just so loving and so wonderful, and then the next thing you know you're sitting there across the table from your best friend all bruised up. How do you do that? She was pretty much wrecked.” Karen initially passed it off, but she then could not make it through the meal. “She couldn't eat, she was crying, and we had to leave. We didn't want anyone to recognize her.”

At the urging of friends and family, Karen met with legal counsel to revise her will on September 1, 1981. She could not yet bring herself to file for divorce but was obviously moving in that direction. “I give all household furniture and furnishings, household equipment and appliances, and silverware located in the residence occupied by my husband and myself to my husband,” she stated in the codicil. “I give any residence occupied by my husband and myself as our home at the time of my death to my husband.” Karen willed everything else to Harold, Agnes, and Richard, listing estimated assets totaling between five and ten million dollars.

Friends suggested she and Tom seek marital counseling. Instead, the Carpenters prepared to leave for Europe and South America. Itchie went along to keep Karen company on this series of Carpenters promotional tours, which began in Paris, France, where Karen's laxative
addiction became an issue. “Laxatives were her major companion,” Itchie says. “When we were in Paris we made quite a scene in a pharmacy across the street from our hotel about her needing to buy more laxatives. I suggested natural food groups that might relieve her ‘constipation,' but she always won those arguments.”

Following a brief stop in Amsterdam, the Carpenters arrived at London's Heathrow Airport on Wednesday, October 21, 1981. They made numerous promotional appearances while in London, both in person and on television. On Thursday they taped an interview for
Nationwide
, a popular news magazine on BBC television. Barely one minute into their visit, host Sue Lawley surprised Karen by casting light on her darkest secret. “There were rumors that you were suffering from the slimmer's disease anorexia nervosa,” Lawley said. “Is that right?”

“No, I was just pooped,” Karen said with an intense frown. “I was tired out.”

“You went down to about six stone in weight, I think, didn't you?” Lawley asked.

“I have no idea what ‘six stone in weight' is,” Karen replied, becoming noticeably uncomfortable and increasingly agitated. She struggled to fake a laugh, rolling her eyes at the interviewer, who quickly converted the amount to approximately eighty-four pounds. “No,” she said, shaking her head adamantly. “No.”

In actuality her weight was hovering around eighty pounds even then. The interviewer's continued efforts to pinpoint a reason for Karen's skeletal appearance prompted Richard to come to his sister's defense. “I don't really feel that we should be talking about the weight loss,” he told Lawley and producers. “Maybe it's better to take a pass on the whole thing. It's really not what we're here for.”

“I am just asking you the questions people want to know the answers to,” she replied.

All involved regrouped, and the interviewer offered to pursue a new line of questioning geared toward Karen's marriage, an almost equally unpleasant topic but one that Karen could fake her way through. Richard agreed to allow the questioning to continue. A labored exhalation was captured by Karen's lapel microphone as Lawley instructed the
Carpenters to relax. “Now, we have to pretend all that didn't happen,” she joked.

“Yeah, I feel
terrific
,” Karen chuckled with heavy sarcasm. And the interview continued. By this point Karen had become what author Ray Coleman called a “professional anorexic,” perfecting the deceit while assuring all those around her she was just fine. While she was considered by those who knew and loved her to be one of the most honest and open individuals they ever met, she was rarely truthful when it came to anorexia nervosa.

R
ETURNING TO
Los Angeles, Karen and Richard joined the Carpenter family to celebrate Harold Carpenter's seventy-third birthday. Family and friends gathered on the evening of November 9, 1981, for dinner at Sambi of Tokyo, a favorite Downey restaurant. After dinner, the party continued at Newville, where Karen and Tom went upstairs and, as Richard recalled, “had it out.”

Evelyn Wallace recalls no sign of tension during dinner but explains, “In the restaurant, Karen wouldn't do that. She would be a lady in a restaurant.” After some time, an exasperated Tom barreled down the stairs exclaiming, “You can keep her!” As he raced away from the house in his car, cousin Joanie ran upstairs to comfort Karen, hugging her and telling her how much she loved and cared for her. The guests downstairs were speechless. Karen was humiliated and inconsolable.

Although the family cites this episode at Newville as the last time Karen saw her husband, Frenda visited Karen back in Bel Air around this time and was shocked to find the couple in the process of making a twenty-thousand-dollar upgrade to a house they did not even own. This was oddly uncharacteristic of Karen, who had a reputation for being thrifty, a trait passed down from her parents. With Tom away, Frenda expressed concern to Karen over the unnecessary expense of home improvements. After all, it was a rented house, and the couple was on the verge of separating. “Karen was very frugal,” Frenda recalls. “She wasn't frugal if she bought you a gift or something, but she earned her own money, and she paid a price for that money. She wasn't cavalier
about it, which I respected. I thought that was a wonderful way to be. She had some areas in which she didn't have much sense, but she
did
have sense in the area of finances. If it had been five hundred dollars I wouldn't have said anything, but this was a lot of money.”

Arriving back home, Frenda was not surprised when the phone rang and it was Karen. It had not even been twenty minutes, but the two talked “fifty million times a day,” she says. But this call was different. Karen was in a panic. “Oh my God, Frenda! Oh my God, oh my God,” she said, her voice quivering in fear.

“Kace, what is it?”

“There was a man that came to the door and I let him in and he said something about the Corniche.”

“Don't tell me it was a burglar,” Frenda scolded. “Kace, you should never have let anybody in!”

“No, no, no. They really
were
from the car agency,” Karen explained.

“Well, what's the problem then?”

“Well, Tom never even bought me the car! It's leased. And he hasn't paid the lease in two months, and they were here to repossess the car. They offered to let me make restitution, and I said, ‘No, just take it!'”

“Kace! Oh my God. I'm coming to get you.”

“No, no, no,” Karen told her. “I want to talk to Tom about it when he comes home.”

“All right,” Frenda said, “but I am going to get a hold of Eddie.”