Even Cherbak’s changes could do little to alter Agnes Carpenter’s hard-edged character once the director cast Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher in the role. Known for her 1975 role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fletcher brought a passive-aggressive slant to every line of dialogue. “I had nothing to do with the casting,” Morrow explains. “Sargent comes in and casts ‘Nurse Ratched!’ Louise Fletcher could say a nursery rhyme and give you the creeps.”
Additionally Joseph Sargent fought to convince the network that a virtual unknown, twenty-seven-year-old Mitchell Anderson, was their “Richard.” The choice for “Karen” was twenty-four-year-old Cynthia Gibb, an attractive character actress who had appeared for three seasons in the original Fame TV series. The actress came into the project knowing very little about the story, aside from general facts. “I knew she and her brother were a music team, that they were enormously successful around the world, and I knew their hit singles,” she says. “I also knew she had an eating disorder and that she died of it. Beyond that I knew nothing.”
When filming began in February 1988, Gibb was dismayed by the number of script revisions occurring on the set each day. “On a daily basis we would go to work prepared to do certain scenes,” she says. “We would always have cuts or rewrites. Anything that was controversial at all was either diluted or removed. Because the family was so attached to the project, there was some whitewashing that went on in the telling of the story.”
Working so closely with Richard, filming in the parents’ home, wearing the Carpenters’ clothing, and driving their cars, the cast and crew quickly came to their own conclusions about Karen’s story. “If you looked from the outside in, you saw exactly what happened to that family,” Mitchell Anderson says. “But from Richard’s perspective and his mother’s perspective, it was completely different.”
Gibb agrees the family’s intricate involvement made it even more difficult to portray the complex characters they were attempting to channel. “There were some aspects of Karen’s upbringing that I felt had contributed to her illness,” she says, “however, the family never felt that she had an emotional disorder. The family did not believe that anorexia was an emotional disorder that becomes a physiological disorder. Therefore, they didn’t believe that Karen had anything other than a weight problem. It was difficult to portray certain emotional challenges that Karen had, because the family did not agree that they existed.”
Richard has always held firm in his belief that the stress of showbiz and an overprotective family had nothing to do with Karen’s anorexia. “What would possess a woman like her to starve herself?” he asked in his 1988 essay for TV Guide. “Some people blame it on career pressures or a need to take more control over her life. I don’t think so. I think she would have suffered from the same problem even if she had been a homemaker.” Richard felt anorexia nervosa was something “genetic, the same way talent is,” as he explained to Susan Littwin in a piece for the same publication. “I have no answers. People have been trying to get that out of me. If I had it, I’d give it.”
The filming of a watered-down version of one of Barry Morrow’s original scenes, set in 1982 in the New York office of Karen Carpenter’s therapist Steven Levenkron, remains vivid in the minds of the cast and crew, even today. “Have you told her that you love her?” the therapist asks the family.
The father starts to respond, but his nervous voice is overpowered by the mother’s. “We don’t do things that way. You show a person, you don’t tell them all the time. . . . I don’t think you understand our family.”
This pivotal scene, Gibb feels, sheds light on the family’s level of denial and unwillingness to fully support Karen’s mission to get well. “She was making progress, and her family came to see her,” she observes. “There was no support for the work that she was doing whatsoever. The family was more old-fashioned in their beliefs that ‘normal’ families don’t need therapy, only ‘crazy’ people do.”
“Mrs. Carpenter, go ahead,” the therapist says, prompting Agnes to voice her love for her daughter.
“For heaven’s sake,” she exclaims. “This is ridiculous! We came three thousand miles for this nonsense?” Gibb’s head drops slowly to the side, her character seemingly ashamed, having burdened the parents with her personal problems. Missing the point, the mother retorts, “We don’t need to prove anything to Karen. She knows we love her.”
Heartbroken and horrified by the scene’s content, the cast was forced to remain neutral, not voicing their opinions or reacting to their emotions. So many revisions had taken place prior to shooting that Richard was unaware of the reactions on the set and seemed pleased with the outcome. “The response from the family and from Richard himself was as if he were in the Twilight Zone,” recalls Mitchell Anderson. “When we were doing that scene we were like, ‘Oh my god, Agnes was such an asshole!’ But after we finished shooting, Richard was so proud of it because he thought the doctor looked like an asshole.”
No matter the amount of dilution, Morrow’s screenplay spoke between the lines and was ultimately as close to the actual series of events in Karen Carpenter’s life as anyone could ask of a biopic. “If there’s an arch-villain of the story, it’s probably Agnes Carpenter,” wrote Ron Miller in a review for the San Jose Mercury News. He illustrated her character as “an imposing woman who found it almost impossible to show her love to her troubled daughter, even after her illness had been diagnosed and the threat to her life was clear.”
In the final scene of The Karen Carpenter Story, however, Agnes Carpenter’s character does soften. She almost repents. For a moment the viewer might forgive and forget her sins of the previous ninety minutes. Louise Fletcher’s “Agnes” gazes affectionately up the staircase at her grown-up little girl for the last time.
“And Karen,” she says with a tender hesitation, “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom,” Karen replies. “Goodnight.”
Sadly, the mother’s “I love you” on the eve of her daughter’s untimely death was a fabrication—creative license justified by CBS Standards and Practices for the purpose of dramatic effect.
1
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
HAROLD BERTRAM Carpenter had a rather peripatetic childhood and even more itinerant adolescence. The eldest son of missionaries George and Nellie Carpenter, he was born November 8, 1908, in Wuzhou, a city in southern China where the Gui and Xi rivers meet. Siblings Esther and Richard were born several years later. The Carpenter parents were both fine pianists and often played and sang for guests at their frequent formal dinner parties. Although he greatly enjoyed their performances, Harold was not as interested in making music. Against his will he took piano lessons for a while but loathed practicing. More an appreciator of good music than a musician himself, Harold began listening to records on the family’s beautiful Victrola. He especially loved the classics.
Harold’s mother was greatly concerned about the limited education her children received in China, where they had no formal education, only tutors. In 1917 Nellie took the children and headed for England where the children were enrolled in boarding schools. Their father joined them four years later when granted a leave of absence. Harold’s younger sisters Geraldine and Guinevere were born shortly before their mother moved with the children to the United States. There they stayed on Ellis Island for several months before settling with relatives in Wellsville, New York.
Waking each morning at 5:00 A.M., Harold delivered newspapers before going to Wellsville High School. After two years he was forced to drop out and go to work when his mother became ill with a lung ailment. His uncle Frank Stoddard, a night superintendent at a paper box company in Middletown, Ohio, offered him a job, and he moved in with his uncle and aunt Gertrude. Harold moved several times with the Stoddards, finally settling in Catonsville, Maryland, a small community just west of Baltimore, where the men found work in a printing firm. Harold’s mother and father separated shortly before Nellie succumbed to pleurisy in
1927 at the age of forty-four.
AGNES REUWER Tatum’s childhood was somewhat less eventful than that of Harold Carpenter, or perhaps only less documented. She was born on March 5, 1915, in Baltimore, where she spent her youth. Her father, George Arthur Tatum, was part owner in Tatum, Fritz, and Goldsmith, a wholesale undergarment business. He and his wife, Annie May, were the parents of four girls: Jenny, Agnes, Audrey, and Bernice.
Agnes was athletic and played several sports, notably basketball, during her years at Baltimore’s Western High School, the nation’s oldest public all-girls school. She enjoyed sewing and became a fine seamstress. She made many of the Tatum girls’ dresses and coats, in addition to the heavy, pleated, velour drapes that hung in the windows of the family home at 1317 Mulberry Street in Baltimore.
In 1932 George and Annie moved to nearby Catonsville, seeking a quieter existence for their daughters. Agnes’s older sister Jenny was no longer living at home, but the other three girls were present when a neighbor introduced them to twenty-three-year-old Harold Carpenter. Agnes was smitten upon meeting the handsome young man and was surprised to see him again just a few days later driving up the street in his shiny Chevrolet. Noticing Agnes and Audrey waiting for a bus, Harold stopped to say hello and offered them a ride.
Agnes and Harold soon began dating, and a four-year courtship ensued. The two were married at Catonsville Methodist Church on April 9, 1935. Times were tough, and there was little pomp and circumstance. There was no wedding cake, and Agnes sewed her own wedding gown. The only gift was a General Electric iron from the bride’s aunt Myrtle and uncle Arthur, who happened to work for GE. Instead of a honeymoon, the newlyweds went for a night out at the movies.
For the next three weeks the couple lived with Agnes’s parents in the Tatum home. Following Harold’s uncle Frank to yet another box printing company, the couple relocated to Richmond, Virginia, where their first home together was a five-dollar-a-week furnished efficiency apartment. After a year they moved into a larger furnished apartment on Fendall Avenue in Richmond’s Highland Park area.
When Agnes’s older sister Jenny separated from husband George Tyrell, she felt her sister and brother-in-law would offer a more stable future for the Tyrells’ eighteen-month-old baby girl, Joanie. Agnes and Harold became surrogate parents and soon moved to Mechanicsville on the northeast side of Richmond, securing a larger home for the growing family. The Carpenters were Richmond residents for five years before returning to Baltimore for a few months and in 1940 finally settling in an apartment on Sidney Street in New Haven, Connecticut. Jenny reunited with her daughter and moved in with Agnes and Harold, where she remained until 1943.
Working for the New Haven Pulp and Board Company, Harold became skilled at running the company’s color printing equipment. Agnes began working, too. She worked eight-hour shifts either six or seven days a week, operating a thread mill machine for Mettler Brothers, a subcontractor of Pratt-Whitney Motor Mounts. Agnes stayed with Mettler’s until World War II came to an end in 1945.
AFTER MORE than ten years of marriage, Agnes Carpenter became pregnant. With their first child on the way, she and Harold began house hunting and settled on a new construction going up on Hall Street in New Haven’s conservative, suburban East Shore Annex neighborhood. Hall Street was cozy and inviting, an almost fairy-tale lane for young families looking to build homes after World War II. Its string of modest, colonial-style homes was just a few miles from Lighthouse Point, a popular beach and amusement park across New Haven Harbor.
The Carpenters and their live-in niece, by then ten years old, moved into the new $8,900 home at 55 Hall Street on August 27, 1946. In less than two months they welcomed a son, born October 15 at Grace-New Haven Hospital. He was named Richard Lynn for Harold’s only brother.
As he grew, Richard became interested in his father’s extensive record collection. The selections were varied and eclectic to say the least, encompassing everything from Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Bourdin to Lannie McEntire, Red Nichols, and Spike Jones and his City Slickers. Even before he could read, young Richard would go through the records and listen for hours. He was able to distinguish the records by feeling the edges and grooves of each 78. At the age of three Richard asked for his own record of “Mule Train,” a popular novelty cowboy song. His first 45 was Theresa Brewer’s Dixieland-tinged “Music, Music, Music,” and shortly after that he asked for “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” by Patti Page.
At 11:45 A.M. on Thursday, March 2, 1950, just three days shy of her thirty-fifth birthday, Agnes gave birth to a little girl, Karen Anne. Her first words were “bye-bye” and “stop it,” the latter a natural response to the antics of an older brother.
Numbering five, the family shared the tidy little 1,500-square-foot, two-story home and its three bedrooms and two bathrooms. “They had nice furniture, everything was neat, everything matched, and everything was clean and shiny,” recalls neighbor Debbie Cuticello, daughter of Carl and Teresa Vaiuso. “It had a finished basement, a garage, a beautiful front yard and backyard we all played in. They had a screen porch in the back and neatly manicured lawns and landscaping. Everybody took pride in their neighborhood. There were always shiny cars in the front yards.”
In a tradition that continues to the present day, the houses on Hall Street came to be identified by the names of the families that lived there in the 1950s and 1960s. Number 55 is the Carpenter house, across the street is the Catalde house, and so on. “The LeVasseurs were on one side, and they’re still there,” Cuticello explains. “The Catanias were across the street, and they’re still there. The Jones family was next door. The Shanahans were a couple of doors down. It was just a wonderful 1950s neighborhood.”
According to Frank Bonito, whose parents bought 83 Hall Street in 1960, “It was a middle-class neighborhood with a lot of working folks. My father was a butcher and owned a grocery store. The Vaiusos, Debbie’s parents, owned a farm. He was a wholesale farmer in Branford, which is one town over. I was at 83. Debbie lived at 77. On the other side were the DeMayos. Mr. DeMayo had worked in the post office. Across the street was a family whose father was a professor at Yale. Millstone was their name. Next to them were the DeVitas. They were an older couple with no children, and the husband was a dentist.”
The New Haven area was settled by a number of Italian immigrants, providing residents with some remarkable pizza parlors in the area. Nearby Fort Nathan Hale Park was the site of many family picnics and play dates. There the children could swim, fish, and fly kites. In winter the fun turned to sledding and snowballing.
The Bonito, Vaiuso, and Carpenter children spent a great deal of time in one another’s homes. Debbie and her brother thought of Agnes and Harold more as aunt and uncle figures, an extended family of sorts. “My brother Joey played with Rich, and I played with Karen,” she says. “Our parents shared the same values and seemed to enjoy the hardworking American ethics. As children, we watched very little television and were outside as long as we could stay . . . playing basketball, baseball, roller-skating, hula-hooping, and playing in the yards. Everybody got along. . . . We didn’t have a lot of money, and they didn’t have a lot of money.”
For extra income, Agnes and Harold started their own car washing business, and the two took great pride in their work. Their pickup and delivery service became popular among the neighborhood families and proved to be a success for the frugal couple, who wanted to give their children a comfortable existence. It was the perfect job for Agnes. She was known to be so persnickety in regard to keeping a clean house that she was often seen standing in the front windows scrubbing the locks with a toothbrush. “Mom was known for having the cleanest garage in Connecticut,” Karen recalled in 1971. “My God, if you mopped, the mop didn’t get dirty!”
According to Frank Bonito, Agnes was “compulsively clean, almost to the point of having some kind of psychiatric issues. . . . The woman made sure everything was immaculate. I can remember her going next door one time and
cleaning the next-door neighbors’ windows on her side of the house because they upset her. She was a very nice woman but very uptight. She seemed to be very stressed all the time.”
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.”
Little Girl Blue Page 2