KAREN WAS twenty-four and Richard approaching the age of twenty-eight when the two decided it was time to leave home. The dilemma was how to proceed without hurting their mother’s feelings. They asked Sherwin Bash for advice. Bash had worked with hundreds of music artists, and in his opinion these siblings were immature. They lacked sophistication—not musically but in their personal lives. He wanted to see them take control of their lives, move out of their parents’ house, and seek the independence of two millionaires in their twenties. “Their inability to develop,” said Bash, “was created by their inability to separate themselves from a dominating mother who they never wanted to offend and never wanted to hurt. . . . I think that severely stunted and damaged their growth.”
According to Evelyn Wallace, this was not the kids’ first attempt at independence. The two had rented an apartment together in Bellflower for a brief spell. “That didn’t last too long,” she explains. “Richard was expecting Karen to do all the cooking and the stuff his mother had done.” But Karen claimed to enjoy inventing new recipes and perfecting others. “Cooking is an art and a pleasure for me; I’ve always loved to cook, ever since I was a child,” she said in a 1971 press release entitled “Karen in the Kitchen: Who Says a Young Female Superstar Can’t Be a Top-Notch Cook?” She listed her favorite creations, which included pies, cookies, shrimp dishes, and “veal and eggplant concoctions.”
Sherwin offered Karen and Richard his advice for officially moving out, but instead of confronting their mother and relocating, the two came up with a way they might evade the issue entirely. They bought their parents a modest 3,000-square-foot home with four bedrooms and three baths at 8341 Lubec Street in Downey, less than two miles from Newville. “The expectation was that their mother and father would move into this new house,” Bash said. “When they explained this to the mother, she absolutely refused to move out of this house. Not only did she refuse to move out, she couldn’t understand why they would want to separate and be living in two different houses.”
Richard was never particularly fond of the Newville house and agreed that he and Karen would move to Lubec Street, while Agnes and Harold stayed at Newville. The decision to move in together seemed natural for Karen and Richard, whose careers came first. They were first and foremost a team and at this point saw no reason to live separately. “If we don’t see each other, we talk at least twice a day,” Karen said in 1981. “We always have to know what the other one is doing. We’re very nosy!”
To many on the outside looking in, siblings living together as adults seemed odd and prompted allegations of incest. Brian Southall, who joined A&M Records’ London team in 1973, fought off reporters’ questions about this brother-sister relationship that sometimes appeared a little too close. They were, after all, a duo that sang love songs. “There were lots of suggestions about their relationship,” Southall said in a 2004 interview. “There was always a worry about the questions that would come out. There were suggestions of an incestuous relationship and stuff like that, which was utter nonsense. But they were an odd couple.”
According to Karen, over the years and especially near the beginning of their careers, many people thought she and Richard were married. “I remember once when we were looking for an apartment in California, and the landlady asked if we had any kids. ‘No,’ we said, telling the truth. ‘That’s good,’ she replied, ‘and I hope you haven’t got any pets either.’ And the photographers were always asking us to kiss! Well, you might hold your brother’s hand, but you don’t kiss him unless it’s a family reunion.”
Richard said, “Maybe it would have been easier if we had been man and wife,” with Karen adding, “It’s been a hell of a battle. We were mistaken for a married couple for so long. How could anyone fail to recognize us as brother and sister? We’re so alike. When we smile we could be Siamese twins.”
Unfortunately for the Carpenters, Southall was not present to screen a disastrous phone interview broadcast live on Toronto radio. “We might as well bring it out,” the deejay told Richard. “I’ve listened to the lyrics of your songs. I know that Karen’s singing them to you. I know they’re about incest. You want to talk about this?” Richard was so caught off guard that he tried to explain how that was untrue. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I don’t even write all of those songs. They just happen to be love songs. Karen sings them. I sing and arrange. We happen to be brother and sister.” Surprisingly, Richard finished the interview, at which time he slammed down the receiver, vowing to never do another phone interview.
“WE’VE MADE it a rule that whoever we go out with must not interfere with our professional lives,” Karen explained in a 1976 interview. “I feel if Richard is going out with the wrong girl, I tell him. He needs someone who will give him a good home, security, and children—someone who will understand him because he’s a special guy.”
Shortly after moving to Lubec Street, Richard began dating Randy Bash, Sherwin’s twenty-one-year-old daughter. Some felt she was pushed by her father into dating Richard, but even Karen was fond of her at first and seemed to approve of the burgeoning relationship. But just three weeks in, Agnes chimed in with her critique, and Richard carelessly told Randy of his mother’s dislike for her. By the time Randy joined the Carpenters on their European tour in February 1974, Richard was well aware that both his mother and sister had it in for her. Despite the young girl’s attempts to be friendly and have lunch or go shopping, Karen ignored and avoided Randy for the duration of the tour. “Richard can have his girl travel with him—she has no career,” Karen told the Los Angeles Times that year, her antipathy apparent. “But what about me? Is my guy supposed to lay around all day while we’re on the road?”
Returning to Los Angeles, Karen was up in arms when Richard invited Randy to move in with them. “Randy came into the picture, and then all hell broke loose,” says Maria Galeazzi. “Then Karen didn’t mind me as much as she did her because she picked up her bags and moved right in! It came back to bite her.” Karen told Richard she would not move the rest of her belongings out of Newville until “that girl” was no longer living under their roof.
After only a week of intense pressure from Karen, Richard told Randy she could not stay. Technically, it was both his and his sister’s house, and they were obviously not going to agree on the matter. Although she packed her things and left, Randy continued to sleep there most every night. “She wasn’t that particular in what, if anything, she ran around the house in,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. After failing to successfully evict Randy from Lubec Street, Karen made it clear to Richard she no longer wanted to wake up in her own house only to find his naked girlfriend had slept over again. She was moving back home to Newville.
WHEN KAREN began dating tall, handsome record executive Mike Curb, the new love interest became a much-needed distraction from her brother’s personal affairs. “It evolved,” Curb recalls of his relationship with Karen. “Richard and I both had sisters, and I think we were all very comfortable together.” The sibling friendships began when Mike and his sister Carole joined Karen and Richard for dinners in the home of mutual friends Ed and Frenda Leffler. The couples also enjoyed evenings of conversation over food and wine at Jack’s at the Beach, a favorite restaurant on the Ocean Park Pier in Santa Monica.
Mike was taken with Karen’s love of life, music, and children. In return, she was impressed by his kindhearted personality, his confident nature, and his good looks. In contrast with Karen’s history of sabotaging her brother’s relationships, Richard was thrilled with her choice of mate this time. “I think Richard was happy that she was dating someone, and I think he liked me,” Curb says. “I liked him.” Richard and Mike started a tradition of music trivia matches. “He was certainly a much better musician than I, but at the time I was a successful record producer.” In addition to the Osmonds, Curb produced Donny Osmond as a solo artist and was just beginning to work with the sibling duo of Donny and Marie. He was named Billboard Producer of the Year for 1972 in recogniti
on of his production of both Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man” and Donny Osmond’s “Puppy Love.” He would later produce Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” the biggest selling record of the decade.
Visiting the Carpenters at A&M Records was a treat for Curb, who enjoyed watching other artists work and the various production techniques employed. “Being a producer, I marveled at the way Richard and Karen worked together,” he says. “Neither one of them ever made small talk. It was always music, records, or something she’d heard on the radio. I have never seen any two people more committed to their careers. Their records never sounded overproduced. They were perfectly produced, but they had just enough edge that they were really right for the moment and the radio.”
Karen and Mike found it taxing to juggle their busy careers and still make time for dates and other opportunities to be together. “I was running MGM Records and producing records at that time, and she was constantly recording and traveling,” Curb explains. “She would go away on international tours for quite a while, so we were unable to spend as much time together as we wanted to.” When openings in their schedules did coincide, Karen and Mike would drive to Newport Beach or San Diego for a boat ride around the harbor.
For their dinner dates, Curb would often drive to Newville to pick up his girlfriend. “I could have been picking up the girl next door,” he says, recalling her unaffected personality. “She never ever got caught up in the trappings of being a successful artist. Aside from maybe a gold record on the wall or a Grammy award on the table, it was just like you were going to your next-door neighbor’s home. It was such a pleasure to be with her because she just loved music, loved life, loved her family, and was so unaffected. I never remember her going out and buying clothes or talking about trendy things. To her, her whole world was her brother, her family, the parents.”
Although they sometimes went for dinner at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, both Karen and Mike favored intimate surroundings. “Both of us preferred something more private,” he says. “Not something where fifty people would come up to us. But I went to the Grammys with her and the American Music Awards, too, so we did some public things.” One of the couple’s first public outings was a double date with Richard and Randy Bash to the Grammy Awards on March 2, 1974, Karen’s twenty-fourth birthday.
From the start of their relationship, Curb recalls Karen was always on a diet. “She was always concerned that when she ate her weight went to her hips, so she wouldn’t eat,” he says. “She always worried about her hips, and that’s one of the reasons she wanted to stay at the drums.” On May 22, 1974, the Carpenters were photographed at home by Annie Leibovitz for an upcoming Rolling Stone cover story. Karen was pleased to have lost some excess weight around her arms and buttocks, and to show off her new figure she wore a new pair of jeans and a tank top. It was a casual and laid-back approach, in contrast with the years of posing cheek to cheek with Richard, wearing matching formalwear. Karen looked radiant and was the picture of good health. Friends were noticing and telling her how great she looked, but no one saw it as obsessive in the beginning, just normal dieting.
Initially, Curb was not alarmed either, but as time went on he started to recognize Karen was establishing the eating patterns and rituals that would proliferate over the coming years. “I noticed very definitely that she was trying to lose weight by just not eating. She would order a meal and maybe eat 25 percent of her food. She was just sort of moving the food around her plate. My sister Carole had the same problem. She and Karen would just not eat.”
During their dinners, Karen reminded Mike her diet was such a success she could not stop and risk gaining the weight back. “You look great,” he affirmed. “Now let’s eat!” Or he would say, “You only ate a third of your plate. Let’s stay until you eat it all.” With his urging, she would usually eat her entire meal. Even Richard noticed that Karen seemed to behave differently and eat more sensibly in Mike’s presence. “How are you getting her to eat?” he asked.
“I would actually insist that she eat,” Curb says. “I would tell her that she looked great and that she should eat. And she would eat!”
After dinner, Mike would sometimes drive Karen to A&M, where she would meet Richard for a recording session. “She liked to record at night,” Curb says. “I stayed enough to see how incredibly talented Richard was. He was amazing, and she had such respect for him. I remember just being stunned.” Curb was even more amazed when he first heard Karen’s voice up close and unaccompanied while driving with her to A&M. “She was rehearsing a song and looking at a piece of sheet music,” he says. “When she sang in a car you could barely hear her voice, but when she got on a microphone it was like velvet. It was a very, very amazing thing. So many singers think they always have to belt out a song. Karen had one of the softest voices in the world, but when you put that voice on a microphone?!”
Despite the couple’s commonalities and mutual admiration, dates between Karen and Mike Curb became more and more sporadic due to their career obligations, and they grew apart. “She went on a long tour, and we started seeing each other less and less,” Curb recalls. “It was really two people that were just so busy. It never really broke up.”
DESPITE THE fact that the Carpenters’ greatest successes stemmed from their recordings, they spent the majority of their professional time on tour. The average Carpenters record took between four and five months to produce. The remainder of the year was spent playing night after night across the country and around the world, in addition to making various personal and television appearances. In 1971 the Carpenters played upward of 150 shows. During 1972 and 1973 they did 174 concerts each year. After six weeks of one-nighters—which was common during those seasons—Karen and Richard were exhausted. While they enjoyed performing, it became a never-ending succession of plane trips, motels, hotels, rehearsals, and sound checks that got them down.
The year 1974 began with the Carpenters greatest hits album, The Singles 1969–1973, topping the Billboard album charts in the United States. The collection was the duo’s first and only #1 album, fueled by nine previous million-sellers, and sales would eventually top twelve million units in the United States alone. It also topped the UK album chart for seventeen weeks between February and July.
The promotional push for the Singles album came in the form of the duo’s second #1 single, “Top of the World.” The Carpenters and A&M Records had certainly underestimated the song’s potential when recorded for 1972’s A Song for You. All involved felt it was a nice album cut but never considered it for single release. Some Top 40 stations had programmed the song based solely upon requests, and in Japan it was culled as a single and quickly went to #1. Carpenters audiences had broken into applause at just the mention of the song once they added it to their live set in the summer of 1972. “All of a sudden people were standing up and cheering,” John Bettis recalled. “Richard was kind of scratching his head and saying, ‘What is all this?’”
When it came around to the Singles album, Richard decided “Top of the World” simply must be the next Carpenters single. “A&M took a little bit of convincing,” Bettis said. “We’re talking about the group that did ‘Superstar,’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,’ and ‘Goodbye to Love’ coming along with a country number.” Karen re-recorded her lead vocal, and other alterations were made to the recording before the new “Top of the World” was remixed and readied for release. “Then Richard had to hold the release of our single,” Bettis said. Country crooner Lynn Anderson released her version of the song—a virtual clone of Richard’s arrangement—which quickly climbed to #2 on the country music chart. “We didn’t want to make anybody mad because we killed their record,” explained Bettis. “We actually had to wait to release that record until Lynn Anderson’s had died off the charts.”
Additionally, the Carpenters’ debut single, “Ticket to Ride,” got a facelift for The Singles. The original 1969 version was a rare instance where tape captured Karen singing consistently
under pitch. Drums were re-recorded, Tony Peluso added a guitar track, and Karen cut a much-improved lead vocal for the new release.
Following the hits album’s success came a year of 203 concerts with sold-out tours across Europe, Japan, and the United States. A weeklong stop at New York’s Westbury Music Fair was followed by two separate four-week stints in Las Vegas at the Riviera and two weeks at the Sahara in Lake Tahoe. The October run at the Riviera was recorded for an intended live album release that never came to fruition. They also participated in a televised concert with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops and, as they had done in 1971, sold out 18,000 seats to fill the Hollywood Bowl.
Leaving Los Angeles on May 27, the Carpenters headed to Japan, where their shows were enjoyed by 85,000 fans. Tickets to their three weeks of concerts had sold out in less than an hour. “It was during their golden years when they were bigger than the Beatles,” says Denny Brooks, a Cal State Long Beach alumnus who frequently toured as the Carpenters’ opening act. “I’m an old folkie from the sixties. I really never had any great record success. I was just a good, working act. They were touring all these different countries, and instead of taking a comedian like a lot of these acts did during that time, they took me, just a guy and his guitar.”
The Carpenters likened their 1974 touchdown in Japan to the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, a mob scene of screaming fans rocking the limousines and pulling at their clothes. “It was outrageous,” Brooks says. “Five thousand people at the Tokyo airport was really crazy, but it was a good time. I remember us doing one-nighters all over Japan, something like twenty-eight nights in thirty days in every single town.”
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