Little girl blue The life of Karen Carpenter

IN 1970, after the Vietnam War and a host of heated causes had turned the country into a mass of raw nerve endings, a young duo emerged on AM radio. Singing of "white lace and promises" and "so much of life ahead," they offered America hope, and became sudden superstars. The Carpenters were a sister and brother who lived with their parents in a West Coast suburb. Karen sang lead; Richard played keyboards, multitracked his voice into an electronic choral blur and arranged with an obsessive ear for perfection. Every rough edge was buffed away and bathed in Southern California sunlight. Cool they weren't. As Randy L. Schmidt points out in "Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter," one critic called their music "polite plastic pop." On a BBC special, the siblings looked like photos out of a '70s high school yearbook: Richard wore a pageboy, a turtleneck and a bland smile; Karen was slightly bucktoothed, with large, sheepish eyes and waist-length hair piled high as a wedding cake. Everyone called them "nice." President Richard M. Nixon proclaimed the proper duo "young America at its very best"; their manager, Jerry Weintraub, called them "the Perry Comos of today." Bette Midler summed up Karen Carpenter's image more bluntly: "She's so white she's invisible!" Yet it was Karen who cut through the act's gloss and gave it humanity. Her supple, pitch-perfect sweet-and-sour voice was so wistful and sincere that it made listeners want to protect her. In "Rainy Days and Mondays," she sang of feeling lost in terms any youngster could understand: "Sometimes I'd like to quit / Nothing ever seems to fit." Even in the cheeriest songs, she sounded fragile. Just how delicate she was became painfully clear by the mid-'70s, when audiences watched her wither away before their eyes. Karen suffered from what were then mysterious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia, and she was slowly starving herself to death. On Feb. 4, 1983, she collapsed in her childhood home. An hour later she was pronounced dead of heart failure. At 32, Karen had joined the ranks of such ill-fated soft-rock stars as Jim Croce and Cass Elliot - gentle souls whose early deaths would forever steep their work in pathos. Richard endured a lesser crash: by the late '70s, he had fallen prey to insomnia, panic attacks and depression, and gotten hooked on quaaludes. His mother is said to have given him his first pill. The Carpenters' story appeared custom-made for "Behind the Music," and in 1998, an episode of that VH1 series purported to tell the whole grisly truth. But the show, which seemed authorized by Richard, stepped blindly around Karen's demons; the family assumed no blame. Schmidt, a Texas-based music teacher known for his research on the Carpenters, has delved into Karen's troubled psyche in this heart-rending biography. Without sensationalism or undue finger-pointing, Schmidt proposes other reasons for Karen's downfall. Foremost among them, he suggests, was her family's refusal to let her grow up or feel in charge of her own life. Her mother, Agnes Carpenter, is portrayed as a controlling harridan who could never say "I love you" to her daughter; instead, she saw her as a mere accessory to the success of Richard, the family Wunderkind, whom Karen herself adored and feared displeasing. Feeling helpless, the young woman sought a deadly form of control over her own body. As explored by Schmidt, the Carpenters' story is a pitiable variation on an old theme: that of a '50s American family with its head in the sand, unable to grasp how anything could have gone so wrong. The duo's roots are fairly mundane for their time. The father, Harold Carpenter, worked in the printing business; Agnes was a clean-freak housewife and an unashamed bigot. Richard and Karen grew up on the sanitized pop music of the '50s; he played organ in church, and she studied drums, an instrument she would long hide behind during their shows. It's hard for Schmidt to inject much life into the family's dry beginnings, but once the Carpenters land a deal with A&M Records in 1969, the pace picks up dramatically. Within little more than a year, the team had scored its first No. 1 single, Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "(They Long to Be) Close to You," and a gold album. As further hits - "We've Only Just Begun," "Superstar," "For All We Know," "Top of the World" - and enormous profits piled up, their management booked them relentlessly, just as these workaholic performers preferred. "Although she claimed to want nothing more than a traditional family life with a husband and children," Schmidt writes of Karen, "business came first." Each of her love affairs foundered, and someone was always there to discourage any relationship that might sidetrack the golden goose. One short-term beau, an A&M executive named John Adrian, found it impossible to break through the barriers erected around Karen. "She lived in a glass bowl," he observes. Karen wound up defying everyone to wed a real estate developer whom her friends thought a gold-digging opportunist. It was, Schmidt says, a "disaster of a marriage." Musically, she made one effort to shake her girlish image and find an independent voice. But as Schmidt recounts, it didn't stand a chance. While Richard recovered from his quaalude habit, Karen teamed with Phil Ramone, a star producer, to work on a solo album. Ramone encouraged her to record sexier, more mature songs; she even took a stab at disco. Karen's excitement soared, then turned to devastation when she faced the appalled reactions of A&M and Richard. The disc went unissued until years after her death. By the time of that recording, anorexia had seized her. Karen's self-consciousness about some minor chubbiness had given way to a dangerously skewed body image; she ate only bites and binged on laxatives and diuretics. Audiences gasped when she walked onstage in sleeveless dresses, looking, as one acquaintance said, like "a Holocaust victim." In 1982, she engaged an anorexia specialist. But according to Schmidt, her mother (and, to an extent, Richard) stayed in denial about her illness, unable or unwilling to view it as anything more than a perverse addiction to dieting. The author relates Karen's story in writing as fluid and affectless as her singing. Schmidt makes no ambitious re-evaluations of the Carpenters' work, nor does he place them in any broad sociological frame. But he also avoids a fan's effusiveness. And as Schmidt details Karen's unstoppable fall, "Little Girl Blue" becomes one of the saddest tales in pop. The endurance of the music helps brighten the ending. Whoever thought that a duo who epitomized vanilla would one day enthrall some of the coolest indie artists? In his 1987 movie "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," the experimental filmmaker Todd Haynes used a cast of Barbie-style dolls to depict Karen as the pawn of a selfish family and recording industry. (Richard had the film withdrawn over copyright issues.) In "If I Were a Carpenter," a CD from 1994, alternative rockers attempted unconventional covers of the duo's hits. The original "Close to You" album was reinterpreted in a 2007 concert by the gender-bending singer and monologuist Justin Bond, formerly Kiki of Kiki and Herb, the punk-inspired cult act. Now comes this compassionate book, which gives a tortured waif the third dimension she deserved. The Carpenters' story is a pitiable variation on an old theme: that of a '50s family with its head in the sand. James Gavin's most recent book is "Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne."

From the beginning, Richard, not Karen, was the talented musician whose parents moved across the country for a better career. Karen dabbled in music and tagged along on gigs, but it would be years before her show-stopping voice commanded the spotlight. And that shift, when the forgotten little sister became star of the act, Schmidt argues, marked the beginning of Karen's deadly, lifelong struggle with weight. Schmidt tracks the anxieties that seem to have driven her eating disorder, including a controlling mother and the lack of a stable love life. After the failure of her first solo effort, Karen made a bid for happiness with the dashing Tom Burris that would prove short-lived; he was only interested in her money. This was one setback too many for the gifted singer, and by 1983 she was dead, at 32. The self-destructive pressures of celebrity make for a familiar narrative, but Schmidt treats Karen's death not as an inevitability, but a tragedy that built slowly. His sympathies for the star border on fawning, but the copious research and quick-moving narration make this a volume that die-hard Carpenters fans and casual listeners alike will find interesting. (May) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.