Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  According to Olivia Newton-John, “It’s very hard to follow a Carpenters record. The Carpenters’ sound and productions were exquisite. She would have gone through criticisms, no doubt.” Karen played the album for Newton-John with Richard present. “I remember Richard said, ‘You’ve stolen the Carpenters sound.’ That was kind of ironic because she was the sound of the Carpenters. Her voice was ‘the Carpenters.’”

  From the project’s beginning, Frenda was certain there would be disapproval from A&M and especially Richard. According to her, his negative opinion of Karen’s solo work signaled a turning point in the siblings’ relationship and one that Karen never seemed to get over. “He told her it was shit,” Frenda says. “All Karen ever wanted was his approval. It could have turned everything in her life around, but it wasn’t there. What’s sad is that he has to live with that, and I don’t think it even fazes him. I do think he should be excused to some extent because he had his own problems, but God Almighty, what does it take to just be kind? They could see she was melting away like a snowman in front of their faces, but they couldn’t do it. It was brutal.”

  Karen’s hopes and dreams for the solo album were shattered. After an exhilarating year of creativity, exploration, and hard work, the entire project was rejected by those she loved and respected most in her family and professional life. “We came in with all these high hopes, and then nobody actually liked it,” Ramone says. “Of course, they had the right to not like it, but it was never in our minds that this could fail. But it was over. The game was over! There wasn’t going to be a part two or attempts to try and figure it out. This wasn’t going to be something we could add a few more songs to and make it OK. Sometimes a mix can change things or save the day, but they didn’t think that would help. The whole thing was a flop. Karen was completely down in the dumps, and so was I. There was nothing that could cheer us up. What was there to say? At the time we didn’t see it as them against us. For us it was all about what we did wrong. ‘What did we miss?’ ‘How did we miss?’”

  Karen and Phil left the A&M lot that day under a veil of disillusionment. “She was absolutely destroyed by the rejection,” Itchie says. “You have to understand she was soul searching. She had always felt inferior. She was trying to grow up and start focusing on herself as an artist, a person, a human, and a woman with needs, and it all just went to pieces. It was like somebody just stepped on her and just erased everything she’d worked for.”

  14

  WHITE LACE AND PROMISES BROKEN

  RETURNING TO Los Angeles and no longer juggling the demands of a bicoastal existence, Karen found time to reunite with friends like Olivia Newton-John, who suggested a relaxing getaway to the Golden Door health spa in San Diego. There they were joined by mutual friend Christina Ferrare, an actress and wife of auto industry executive John DeLorean. During their stay at the spa, Karen told the women how she finally felt ready to find a husband and settle down, and spelled out her ever-growing list of requirements in a man. This was met with laughs from the other women, who told her she would be extremely lucky to find someone possessing even half of those prerequisites.

  It was around this same time that Karen was astonished to learn that ex-boyfriend Terry Ellis had become engaged. She had always regretted the way she ended their relationship and had even hoped they might one day rekindle their romance. After weeks of introspection and the continued urging of Itchie, Karen decided to call and invite Terry to lunch. After all, in her mind he was only engaged. He was not yet married, so perhaps there was still a chance to renew his interest in her. “Listen, I’ve made a big mistake,” she began. “I really made a big mistake in ending our relationship. Can we get back together again?”

  “Well, Karen, I’m engaged,” he told her. “I’m going to be married.”

  Along with Olivia Newton-John and Christina Ferrare, Carole Curb was one in a small group of trusted girlfriends who always kept their eyes and ears open in hopes of finding “Mister Right” for Karen. “I have somebody I think you’d like to meet,” she said.

  “Yeah, sure Carole,” she replied, the sarcastic rolling of her eyes perceived across the phone line.

  Though Karen valued Carole’s good taste and sensitive discretion, she felt as though she had heard it a thousand times before. Moreover, she wasn’t thrilled by the idea of a blind date, even one arranged by a well-meaning cupid. “But he’s nice, good looking, and he’s philanthropic,” Curb urged reassuringly.

  This latest prospect was Thomas James Burris of Newport Beach, whom Carole had met while attending a dinner with her brother, Mike Curb, whose career path had made several unexpected turns coinciding with the dissolution of his own relationship with Karen. Following the 1974 sale of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the MGM Records label by Las Vegas resort mogul Kirk Kerkorian, Curb’s work in the record industry was only part time, and he eventually became involved in government. In 1977 he married Linda Dunphy, daughter of popular Southern California news anchor Jerry Dunphy, and by 1980 Curb was lieutenant governor of California and national vice chairman of the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign. The Curbs knew Tom Burris as an enthusiastic Reagan supporter and active member of another organization overseen by Mike Curb, the Commission of Californias, which promoted relations between California and Baja California. “My sister Carole played a role in the matchmaking,” he recalls, “but I did not. It was the busiest time of my life back then. But I did know Tom, and he sure seemed like a nice guy.”

  Thirty-nine-year-old Burris met a number of Karen’s requirements in a potential husband. “He was very attractive, very nice, and he seemed very generous,” Carole says. “He had just donated some ambulances to some of the hospitals in Baja California.” Burris was not in the music business. A native of Long Beach, Tom had dropped out of school at the age of thirteen and went to work as a mechanic’s assistant. In 1958 he joined the Marine Corps and after being discharged worked in a Long Beach welding shop. He later worked as a steel contractor and general housing contractor before becoming the self-proclaimed “industrial developer” who founded Burris Corp. in Long Beach in 1964. In 1975 he moved the business to Corona, California, where he built the city’s first planned industrial complex on Pomona Road. An avid NASCAR fan, Burris was a handsome man with blond hair and blue eyes, seemingly affluent and successful, but he was not single. In fact, Burris was the married father of an eighteen-year-old son. He clarified to Carole that he and his wife were separated and their divorce was underway.

  Karen first met Tom Burris on a double date with Carole and then husband Tony Scotti on Saturday, April 12, 1980. The couples enjoyed dinner at Ma Maison, the West Hollywood bistro that launched the career of celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. Having just returned from the East Coast, Karen was a bit jet-lagged. In fact, she wanted to cancel the date, but Agnes Carpenter urged her to attend. Over dinner, Burris told Karen that he was not familiar with the Carpenters or their music. “He really didn’t know who I was,” she said. “I hadn’t known him an hour, but I said to him on the first date, ‘What, have you been under a rock for ten years?’” Even so, Karen bought Tom’s story and found herself instantly attracted. “I automatically liked him. I liked his way, his look, his style, and his car,” she laughed. “It was the first time I had actually been attracted on the first date.”

  At the end of the evening, Karen phoned Frenda Leffler, who had helped ready her hair and makeup that afternoon. “So, how did it go?” Leffler asked.

  “Oh, Frenny,” she exclaimed, “he reminds me of Chard!” (In addition to “R.C.,” “Chard” was one of Karen’s many nicknames for her brother.)

  After the first date Tom Burris mysteriously disappeared. Karen was disappointed when she did not hear from him right away and blamed herself for running him off. “She told us all about this guy she met and how she really liked him, but she hadn’t heard from him” says Frank Bonito. “What he did was he went off to Las Vegas or somewhere and got a divorce.” But Tom soon returned to the scen
e with gusto, at which time he and Karen embarked upon a whirlwind romance. “It seemed to go really quickly,” Carole Curb recalls. She was pleased to see the new couple having a great time together. “What was not to like?” she says. “He had a silver Rolls-Royce, and he was very charming. They got along well and seemed to kind of bond. He seemed really nice.”

  Best friends Frenda and Itchie did not share Carole’s optimism. “I disliked him from the second I met him,” Frenda says. “I thought he was a phony and a blowhard. He was egotistical and arrogant.”

  Itchie tried to remain positive despite some suspicions. She had heard from friends that Tom’s background had checked out, and Karen seemed excited. Reportedly, he was not a gold digger. “I liked him at first—sort of,” she says. “But I didn’t really believe him. He was blond and he was cute but overly manicured and a little too good to be true. He always had a plastic smile and would never look me in the eye.” Itchie was shocked when Karen told her, “I think he’s going to pop the question,” just one day after Tom met her and Phil.

  “Now, wait a minute, Kace,” she replied. “I just met him. And so did you for that matter! Does he know about the anorexia? Does he know what to look for? Does he know the signs?”

  “No, no, no, I’m over it,” Karen assured her. “I’m eating and I’m really, really happy!”

  Itchie was panicked but backed off, not wanting to discourage Karen. “She had searched so long for the perfect guy. I really didn’t want to rain on her parade.”

  Phil Ramone concurred with his wife and Karen’s other friends. “It was like he was too perfect,” he says, “but that was an attractive thing for her.”

  “So what did you think?” Karen asked Phil after he joined the couple for dinner.

  “I don’t like his hair,” he said teasingly. “He’s too perfect. It’s Tom Terrific!”

  Karen soon took Tom to meet the Carpenter family at home at Newville. “She brought him into the office and introduced us all,” Evelyn Wallace recalls. “He was a really nice looking man, and he was very, very polite. I could see nothing wrong with him. I think she really loved Tom. Maybe it was just a crush, I don’t know, but she seemed to be in love with him.” Like Evelyn, the Carpenter family was initially charmed by Tom. “He gets along fabulously with my family,” Karen told People Weekly.

  Whether it was his good looks, personality, or what Karen told them about his career and real estate successes, the family seemed to be won over by Burris—even Richard at first. “Tom instinctively knew what to do,” recalls Itchie. “He started palling around with Richard, although even Richard seemed a little apprehensive at the time.”

  Tom laughed when he told the family how he had been unfamiliar with the Carpenters and their music before having met Karen. “I didn’t know anything about the Carpenters,” he said.

  This left Evelyn Wallace skeptical. “You mean you’ve never heard them?” she asked. “They’re on the radio a lot. You haven’t heard them on the radio?”

  “Oh, I am too busy,” he replied.

  Recalling the conversation with Burris, Wallace is angry she did not see through what she now recalls as an act. “I know in my heart that he knew darn well who Karen Carpenter was . . . and that there would be a lot of money there.” Friends agreed and cautioned Karen that Tom could possibly be an opportunist. “Is he deaf or something?” Itchie asked. “Has he never turned on a radio or a television? I mean, come on!”

  AFTER MONTHS of disappointment and disillusionment in her professional life, it was no wonder Karen’s focus turned to her budding romance with Tom Burris. Undoubtedly their relationship took her mind off the snubbed solo album, which was officially shelved on May 5, 1980. “Duo Takes Precedence,” Billboard announced, claiming that the album was “shelved at her request, to avoid interfering with a Carpenters LP.” A&M Records’ president Gil Friesen was quoted saying, “Karen thought about it long and hard and decided that the duo takes precedence; that was the priority in her life, and there was no way she wanted the solo project to interfere.”

  According to Evelyn Wallace, Phil and Itchie wanted more than anything to see Karen’s album through to completion for Karen’s sake. “They would have done anything to get it done for her, but Richard wasn’t willing to give up one minute.” In fact, he had returned to work and even booked studios for various Carpenters-related projects, including their impending “comeback” album. Their Music, Music, Music special, which became their final for ABC-TV, was set to air in a matter of weeks, and Karen’s album was low on the list of priorities.

  According to Phil Ramone, “Once Richard didn’t like the album, the traditional response in that family was, ‘We’re not going to like it either.’ Nobody would jump forward to say, ‘Now wait a minute, this is what Karen wanted to say, and we should accept that.’ And once you’ve put it on the shelf, you’ve put it on the shelf.” He and Itchie wanted the album on record store shelves and to see Karen singing in clubs and performing concerts to promote her new music. According to Itchie, “The artists who had come forward and supported her thought it was really a strange deal considering who they were and who she was. Once again the attention got focused on Richard, what Richard wanted and what Richard needed.”

  Musician Russell Javors was worried to hear of the unenthusiastic response from Richard and A&M. “Poor Karen,” he says. “She was an artist, and she was just trying to work and to explore her craft, and she had every right as an artist to do that. Collaboration is only as good as the sum of its parts, and you have to let each one of those pieces explore what it is that they do. There have to be equal parts. Nobody can be controlling. Karen was every bit as important to those records—if not more so—than the other part. She had the right to explore it. Richard had his own issues at the time. I am sure that he was not thrilled about this project, but if he were in good enough shape to work they would have been working together. Not her with us.”

  In a 1993 interview Richard explained how he often felt wrongly accused in the case of the solo album and reaffirmed it was Karen’s choice and not his urging that put a stop to the album’s release. “I get the blame for this, you know,” he said. “People who are ‘anti-Richard / pro-Karen’ seem to take everything that was wrong with Karen and blame it on me. They say that I talked her out of releasing this record because I was ready to start our new album. It was sheer nonsense. All you have to do if you don’t believe me is talk to Herb, talk to Jerry, or talk to Derek. . . . They believed that it didn’t have any hits on it, and they weren’t going to release it. It had nothing to do with me.”

  A&M officials agreed unanimously with the album’s cancellation. Despite his enthusiasm at the New York playbacks, Derek Green felt the album was “a dog” from a commercial standpoint. “To everybody’s credit, the record was stopped,” he told Ray Coleman. “The responsibility to the greatest extent with an artist like that would rest with the producer. And it was a mismatch.”

  Asked over the years about the album’s shelving, Herb Alpert almost always answered with nervous hesitation, choosing his words carefully. According to him, the album did not have an effect on him in the same way that a Carpenters album would. He also described Karen as being indecisive and explained how she would go back and forth between loving and hating the album. Other times he conveniently forgot the details. “I don’t exactly remember why, but I’m sure she wasn’t real comfortable with it.”

  According to Jerry Moss, the men were simply thinking of Karen’s best interests. “We didn’t think it would get a really great reaction,” he said. “We didn’t want to have Karen go through that, you know.”

  In public and to the press, Karen put on her game face, nonchalantly glossing over the project’s demise. “It’s a good album,” she said in 1981. “It just dragged on so long. It seemed all of a sudden to be getting in the way of us going back to work again. . . . It got to a point where I had to make up my mind because Richard wanted to go back to work and . . . I wanted to
go back to work, too, as the Carpenters. . . . I’m sure there would have been people who would have been shocked, and a lot of people who would have loved it. I didn’t put it away because I was dissatisfied. We ran out of time.”

  “I WANT to spend the rest of my life with you,” Tom Burris told Karen two months into their relationship. She was unsure how to interpret such a declaration so she phoned Karen Ichiuji for advice. Already hesitant to support her friend’s blind faith in Tom, Itchie was shocked to learn of the couple’s quickly progressing love affair. “I think Tom proposed,” Karen said.

  “You don’t just think,” Itchie said, explaining that a proposal of marriage should never be a vague or indefinite statement.

  Karen’s uncertainty was resolved a few days later on Monday, June 16, when Tom officially asked her to marry him and presented her with a ten karat pear-shaped diamond ring. Although she had been anticipating the proposal, she did not accept right away. Tom was still married, and his divorce would not be final for another two days. Seeking her mother’s advice, she asked, “Should I marry him?”

  Agnes offered little assistance, telling her daughter she was old enough to know what she was doing. “That’s all up to you,” she said. But Karen knew what she wanted all along. She was under Tom’s spell and not about to let this opportunity pass her by. She returned to Tom, accepting his proposal on June 19, the day after his divorce became final. To celebrate their engagement, Burris presented his fiancée with a new Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible to match his own. “Hey Itch!” Karen said, waking her friend with an early morning phone call. “You wanna be a B.M.?”