Sadly, the Nichols-Williams partnership came to an end in 1972, shortly after the Carpenters’ release of A Song for You. “Paul wanted to be a star himself,” Nichols recalls. “He was taking off and hired managers and lawyers and left me in the dust there. We stopped writing. It just wasn’t happening.”
The partnership between the Carpenters and producer Jack Daugherty came to an end around this time as well. Richard was enraged to read a review of their latest album in Cashbox magazine praising Daugherty’s production abilities. Karen and Richard had remained faithful to Daugherty since he helped get their demo into the hands of Herb Alpert three years earlier, but over time this loyalty began to wane. Despite Daugherty’s billing as producer, those were Richard’s arrangements and Richard’s productions. Some called Daugherty the Glenn Miller of the 1970s, but as far as the Carpenters were concerned he was more of an A & R man than a sound architect. He did offer production advice, but most of his time was spent booking studios and musicians, in addition to searching for potential musical material. “In the beginning Jack was the avenue between us and the Carpenters,” says Roger Nichols. “He’d always say, ‘Have you got anything new? What’s happening? Let me hear your songs,’ and so on. Later on Richard and Karen really were on the outs with him. Richard didn’t need anybody to do that anymore. He felt that he was producing the records and Jack was just putting his name on them.”
By 1972 Daugherty had his own secretary at A&M Records and was earning a $25,000 annual salary as staff producer for the label, in addition to his earnings from the sale of every Carpenters record. According to Allyn Ferguson, who worked with Daugherty and the Carpenters, “Jack just took a ride. He got credit for it, but he was not really a producer. He wasn’t even at A&M before them. He was just the liaison between the Carpenters and A&M in the beginning, having initially brought them to Herb.”
Hal Blaine claims to have stayed out of such politics, but he witnessed similar conflicts between artists and producers over the years. “I spent years with John Denver, and his ‘producer’ would be fast asleep in a booth. It was the musicians who made the records, but once a group gets rid of the producer and starts saying ‘we can make our own records,’ that’s usually the beginning of the end of the group.”
Asked in a 1973 UK press conference what part Daugherty had played in creating the Carpenters sound, Richard responded firmly: “Nothing. That’s why he’s no longer with us. We produced all those singles. It’s a long story, but Jack had nothing to do with anything. He was responsible for getting Herb Alpert to hear our tape, which was very nice, but he wasn’t our producer. You’ll notice he hasn’t had one record on any chart since he left us.”
Once terminated, Jack Daugherty took the matter to court, where he claimed that the firing had destroyed his credibility in the music industry. The battle took some nine years to settle, finally going to trial in 1981. Although the court found in favor of A&M and the Carpenters, their defense cost the record company between $350,000 and $400,000. Three years after Daugherty’s 1991 death, Michael Daugherty sought to vindicate his father’s contributions to the Carpenters’ music. “The man who produced the lion’s share of the Carpenters’ hits was my late father, Jack Daugherty. . . .,” he wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. “Richard Carpenter seems intent on trivializing Daugherty’s inestimable influence in the creation of the Carpenters’ sound. . . . My father would have enjoyed knowing that the sound he fashioned more than twenty years ago continues to be appreciated by so many.”
AN UNLIKELY friendship was born when Karen began to reach out more and more to Frenda Franklin. “Can we go shopping sometime?” Karen would ask. Or “Could I go to the hairdresser with you?” Initially Karen had been intimidated by Frenda’s affluent lifestyle, fine clothing, and expensive jewelry. She seemed in awe of the woman’s sense of style and sophistication. Frenda was five years Karen’s senior and over time became her closest confidante and mentor. “Karen became like a baby sister to me,” Frenda explains. “We became friends. Slowly.”
Karen admitted she had been jealous and apologized to Frenda for having been so impolite when the two first met and begged forgiveness. Frenda was taken aback. She was astonished that someone so supremely gifted and amazingly talented could be jealous of anyone.
“You really don’t have any idea, do you?” she said.
“About what?” Karen asked.
“About how good you are. If you did, you wouldn’t be jealous of anybody.”
Karen refused the compliment, instead reiterating her apologies for having been disrespectful. “Well, you were just awful,” Frenda confirmed, and the two laughed over what in retrospect seemed insignificant.
Shopping with Frenda on Rodeo Drive and around Beverly Hills, Karen was unsure of the proper etiquette used in such upscale stores and boutiques. She was terribly nervous that she might say or do something inappropriate. “Now Frenny, if I go into a store and I do something wrong you’ll tell me, right?” she asked.
“Let’s get this straight,” Frenda said. “I wouldn’t want you to go in there and do a cartwheel, but Karen, they want your money!”
As their friendship grew, Frenda became one of the few people in whom Karen placed all confidence. “There were things Karen would never ever tell anyone, but maybe Frenda,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “She talked to Frenda a lot about things that happened with her mother.” Around her parents, especially her mother, Karen became nervous about what might be said or done in Frenda’s presence. The fact that Franklin came from a large Jewish family did not dissuade Agnes Carpenter from voicing her anti-Semitic opinions around her. Karen would apologize profusely for her mother’s words and attempt to explain away the ignorant comments and how they stemmed from Agnes’s upbringing.
“On one level, they were very good people,” Franklin says of the Carpenter parents. “Harold was the greatest. What a doll. What a sweet, sweet man.” Evelyn Wallace agrees, recalling Harold as a quiet man who was nice to everybody. “He was a real sweetheart, and I admired him so much,” she says. “Many times I wondered how he could live with that woman the way she used to yell and scream at him. She would jump on him, and he would never ever fight back. He just sat there and took it. He wasn’t a sissy but just a real nice guy. Agnes was the speaker, so he wasn’t really one to get a word in edgewise.”
“Agnes kind of has a mean streak in her sometimes,” Harold told Evelyn in the home office one afternoon.
“Yeah, I kind of noticed that!” she said sarcastically.
“Harold wasn’t allowed to have an opinion,” Frenda says. “Agnes was a bulldozer. In my own way I loved her. She was Karen’s mother, and she gave her life. But I was sorry that she had so many prejudices. She used really bad language, too. I’d never known anyone that called somebody the n-word. Those things do not go down well with me. I was shocked.” The Jackson Five was the target of such talk on several occasions, and Karen was mortified when her mother would make such bigoted comments. She seemed ashamed and wanted very much to dissociate herself from what she saw as dogmatic narrow-mindedness. “Oh, Frenny, you’re still going to be friends with me, right?” she’d ask apprehensively. “You’re not going to hold it against me, are you?”
“Kace [a nickname derived from K.C.], of course not,” Frenda would tell her again and again. “It’s nothing to do with you. Don’t be silly.”
This reaction from Karen was nothing unusual. She was a people pleaser with a strong desire to keep everyone around her happy, even if it came at her own expense. Her closest friends knew she was sensitive and vulnerable, and neither quality could withstand her mother’s brutality. Somewhere along the way Karen had adopted a rugged exterior—an almost masculine facade—to protect herself from her mother’s unapologetic harshness. She struggled with femininity, and many who were close to her say Karen always remained childlike, like a little girl who never really grew up or blossomed into a woman. In a 1974 Rolling Stone cover story, even Tom Nolan remark
ed on Karen’s perceived immaturity. “Karen is in some ways like a child,” he wrote, “which is not surprising. A star since nineteen, a committed musician even longer than that, she probably missed out on one or two normal stages of adaptation to ‘the real world.’”
Between the years 1970 and 1975, Sherwin Bash witnessed a gradual transformation in Karen from an immature tomboy to an attractive young woman. He felt it was indeed an effort on her part to break free from the only way of life she had known in hopes of exchanging it for a life she very much desired. In his words, there was “a very strong attempt on Karen’s part, whether she was consciously aware of it or not, to find a place for herself in the social strata of young womanhood.” This transformation had little to do with her status as an entertainer or celebrity. She was more intent on becoming someone who “had friends, could go out on dates, and have a social life,” said Bash. “And I don’t believe she ever totally achieved it.”
What Bash had sensed was in actuality a concentrated effort on Karen’s part to shed her tomboy qualities for a more feminine persona. “She wanted to be a woman,” says Frenda, who at Karen’s urging assisted in a slow but steady makeover. “She so wanted to be refined. She wanted to be what she called ‘uptown.’ It sounds so peculiar, but she wanted what she knew she could earn and wanted all the finery that went along with her career. She looked to me for that.”
The transformation would not be easy, as Karen had exhibited this tough exterior and guise for most of her life. Having grown up playing baseball with the neighborhood boys, then becoming a drummer and going on tour with an all male band, she walked and talked like one of the guys. “She used to walk across the stage like a Mack truck,” Frenda exclaims. “Feminine she wasn’t. We had to work on her posture a lot and her walking. . . . I worried about it because I didn’t want people to take her the wrong way. That wasn’t who she was. That was Karen not wanting to get hurt. I think a lot of it was a cover-up. I really do. If you put up a big, thick wall, and you’re kind of a tough guy, you’re not going to expose your gentleness.”
Karen’s makeover from Downey to “uptown” took years. In fact, it was more of a work in progress. “We went from A to Z, as you would with a baby,” Frenda explains. “She was such a fast study. It was amazing. I wanted her to put her best foot forward, especially if it was on camera or in an interview. I didn’t want her to be afraid and let that ‘best offense is a good defense’ come right out.” Karen respected Frenda and took her directives very seriously. “Sit up straight,” she would instruct Karen. “Talk like a lady and act like a lady. Oh, and don’t come off like a truck driver!” The two would laugh. Just when Karen seemed to have reached her goal of walking and talking like a lady, according to Frenda, “There were still times the ‘Downey’ would come back out!”
Karen often borrowed accessories from Frenda’s extensive wardrobe to complement her own. Lending her a handbag for an award show appearance, Frenda scrawled with a marker on a small index card and dropped it in the purse. Later that evening, Karen opened the bag and discovered the drawing of two huge eyes and was reminded that her friend was watching her every move and hoping for the best. Also on the card were three letters—G.U.S.—an inside joke between trainer and trainee instructing Karen to “grow up, schmuck!”
“BEING THE only girl makes you the center of attention,” Karen explained in a 1971 interview for Teen magazine. “Let’s face it, any girl likes to get attention, and the guys are all very protective toward me. It’s wild, I tell you. I can’t make a move. They’re always watching out for me.” Even so, Karen longed for the companionship of another female while on the road. “Sometimes I feel as if I’ve got to have another girl to talk to, but that’s only natural.”
Agnes and friend Beverly Nogawski kept weekly hair appointments every Friday morning at the Magic Mirror, a local beauty shop near the intersection of Firestone and Lakewood boulevards in Downey. “Did you know Karen is looking for somebody to do her hair?” Nogawski asked salon manager Maria Luisa Galeazzi.
“The idea of traveling and going places attracted the wild card in me,” says Galeazzi, who accepted an offer from Karen after a brief interview at Newville. “But I didn’t know what I was going to get myself into! Karen and I became friends—sort of—but I never really took the initiative to become very personal with her. . . . I didn’t stick my nose in anything. If I saw things I just kept quiet. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil!”
Richard was immediately attracted to the feisty blond Italian. “He had fallen for Maria before they even left on the tour,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “When she would come to do Karen’s hair at the house, the doorbell would ring, and before I had a chance to get up from my desk Richard was down those stairs and at the door.”
Galeazzi’s first gig was July 7, 1972, at University of Houston, where she went straight to work caring for the group’s personal property, from travel clothes to stage outfits and jewelry. “Nothing was out of place, and everything was put away and locked up and ready to go for the next gig,” she explains. “I remember the first night. My God, I was scared to death. We were a couple of stories down, way underneath the stadium, and I could barely hear the announcement to get Karen up there.” Prior to the concert, an intoxicated fan jumped to the stage and sat down at Karen’s drums during the performance by opening act Skiles and Henderson. “Karen, I want to marry you!” he yelled as he pounded on the instruments. The man was apprehended after assaulting a police officer. “Don’t touch me!” he shouted as he continued to kick and scream his way off stage. “I’m engaged to Karen Carpenter!” Authorities found wedding rings and airline tickets for the supposed honeymoon once they booked him into the local jail.
Leaving the stadium, Galeazzi was unprepared for the farewell rituals of Carpenters fans, something Karen and Richard were accustomed to by this juncture. “I was not ready for all the fans pulling hair and clothes and trying to get into the car. They were just crazy and making the car jump up and down and everything.” Neighbors Tex and Charlene McAlister witnessed the pandemonium as well when they would attend concerts with the Carpenter parents. “It was almost impossible to get out of there after a concert because the kids would go so crazy,” Charlene recalls. “We were in a limo with their parents, and the fans all thought that we were Richard and Karen. ‘Just raise your hand and wave,’ Harold told us. The fans were all over the hood of the car. We ended up being the decoy car, and Richard and Karen were behind. It was just a regular car that nobody even looked at.”
One of the more serious scares occurred as the Carpenters prepared for a concert at Oregon State University in Corvallis. As Karen and Maria left their hotel rooms they were attacked by several men and tackled to the ground. “We were walking down the hallway to go to the gig and some gypsies jumped us,” Galeazzi recalls. “They came out of another room and jumped us! We were down on the ground. It’s a good thing the guys from the band were not far behind us. It was really, really scary.”
At times, Frank Bonito and other friends were concerned for Karen’s safety and did all they could to preserve her privacy. “We wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom alone,” he says. “We were always very protective of her. This was around the time Patty Hearst was kidnapped and all that. Richard wasn’t noticed as much as Karen was since he wasn’t in the forefront.” He recalls accompanying Karen to a department store once. “When she had her sunglasses on people would walk on by. Everything was fine until she used her credit card. Then we had to leave the store!”
Most Carpenters fans were kind and respected the duo’s space. Others could be almost abusive. Dinner interruptions were frequent, so they would often ask for a private room or at the very least position Karen with her back to the main dining room. “They are quite gracious when asked for autographs,” wrote Tom Nolan in Rolling Stone, “considering how often they are approached in restaurants, after concerts, while riding in limousines. . . . Approached during breakfast in Richmond, Virginia, by a r
otund and particularly nervy fellow bearing five napkins to be individually inscribed, Karen blurted out in disbelief, ‘Oh, fuck!’”
Despite the fame and recognition, Karen seemed to remain the simple, unpretentious girl Frank Bonito had walked to and from school with years before. Her trust of such friends seemed to grow with every mounting success. “Karen felt comfortable with us,” Bonito says. “She was very down-to-earth and never played the prima donna. She was always interested in what we were doing in our lives. We represented history and security. We also represented how her life would be if she weren’t a singer.”
Nathan Hale eighth grade class of 1963: Karen is in row 3, fifth from right. Frank Bonito
Karen with classmates. From left: Frank Bonito, Anthony Viollano, Debra Cusack, and Karen. Frank Bonito
Eighth grade graduation day, June 1963: Mitchell Porylo, Karen, Carol DeFilippo, Frank Bonito, and Sophie DeFilippo. Frank Bonito
Class pictures, 1965 and 1967. Downey Historical Society
Concert choir, 1966–67. Karen in second row, middle. Downey Historical Society
Singing in the annual Viking Varieties talent show at Downey High School, March 1965. Downey Historical Society
1965–66 Downey High School drum line: Randy Malquist, Karen, Nancy Roubal, John Higgins, and Frankie Chavez. Downey Historical Society
With Wes Jacobs at Viking Varieties, March 1966. Downey Historical Society
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