Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Among the mourners was Tom Burris, who, according to Karen’s closest friends, had come forward saying that he was still Karen’s husband (which was legally true, as Karen had never signed the final divorce papers) and threatening against releasing her body to the family. “We had problems with him after Karen passed away,” Frenda Franklin recalls. In a statement to People magazine Burris claimed he and Karen “always got along” and “always cared about each other. Karen was dealing with her anorexia and her career; I was dealing with my real estate problems. I feel totally guilty, like I’d like to reverse everything. I tried to work with her. I got her in touch with a doctor, but she wouldn’t admit she had an eating problem. We both tried, but we just couldn’t work it out.”

  Tom Burris tossed his wedding ring into the casket alongside Karen’s body, an act later explained by Ray Coleman to be a sign of affection. Others were unmoved by this display.

  Burris later called the Newville house and asked Agnes for Karen’s personal wedding album. “Get it wrapped up and send it to him,” she told Evelyn Wallace.

  “Agnes, why are you sending this to him?” she asked. “I don’t think Karen would want him to have that. I wouldn’t give it to him!”

  But Agnes was “hard-hearted,” she says. “She made me wrap that up and mail it to him. I was just fuming to think that she would give him that wedding album. He probably sold it for several thousand dollars.”

  Itchie Ramone confronted Tom several months later when he surprised her with a phone call shortly after Karen’s passing. “I’m really sorry I even picked up the phone,” she told him. “Tom, the only thing I have to say to you is if we are ever in the same room at the same time, you’d better make sure you see me first.”

  LINING UP as early as 10:00 A.M., fans surrounded the gray stone walls of Downey United Methodist Church on the morning of Tuesday, February 8, awaiting the 1:00 P.M. funeral service for Karen Carpenter. Members of the Downey police force, in addition to private guards from Shaw Security, directed dozens of limousines through the crowds of mourners and curiosity seekers lining Downey Avenue. Olivia Newton-John, wearing a black dress and sunglasses, was among a list of celebrities in attendance, which also included John Davidson and Burt Bacharach. “We just missed Dionne Warwick,” yelled one spectator as her friend put away her camera. Overflow seating was moved to a large room holding approximately 250 people, and another 400 were led to a courtyard where they were able to hear the service on speakers. “It was simply horrible,” remembers Carole Curb, who sat alongside Terry Ellis and his wife. “We just held hands and cried,” she says. “We were all heartbroken,” Ellis adds.

  Karen’s New Haven childhood minister Reverend Charles Neal gave the eulogy. “Into every nook and cranny of this global village the sad news travels yet, and the world weeps. For Karen’s story is one that has graced this world with life, with love, and with song.”

  Neal recalled first meeting Karen when she and Richard were part of the Methodist youth ministry that welcomed him when he relocated to New Haven where he attended Yale University. He described her childhood as a balance of “blue jeans, baseballs, and ballet,” going on to assess her adulthood and its many ups and downs. “Karen’s life has continued to unfold—a unique and beautiful tapestry woven with all the experiences of life: a tapestry at once joyous and furious; a tapestry filled with the joys of time but also the tyranny of time; the joy of success but also the tyranny of success; the joy of life but also the tyranny of life . . . joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, limelight and loneliness, love and heartache, health and illness, triumph and tragedy, quietness and fury.” Neal concluded his tribute with the words of John Bettis.

  She sang for the hearts of us all

  Too soon and too young

  Our Karen is still

  But her echo will linger forever

  Frank Pooler’s Cal State University Choir choir sang “Adoramus Te” by Corsi and backed soloist Dennis Heath on an arrangement of the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria,” transposed from the Carpenters’ Christmas Portrait album. Pallbearers David Alley, Herb Alpert, Steven Alpert, John Bettis, Ed Leffler, Gary Sims, Ed Sulzer, and Werner Wolfen carried the casket from the church at the close of the service. A small group of close friends and family reconvened for a brief private ceremony at Forest Lawn Cypress. “It’s so sad,” Harold Carpenter uttered again and again to those gathered. “It’s just all so sad.”

  According to her friends, Karen feared death and especially the idea of being buried in the ground. She pleaded that she never be “planted,” a term she used in jest to describe such interment. In keeping with her wishes, Karen’s body was entombed above ground in a massive, ornate marble crypt in the Sanctuary of Compassion at Forest Lawn’s Ascension Mausoleum. Towering overhead was an elaborate mosaic depicting Madonna and Child by Spanish Renaissance artist El Greco. A lustrous gold epitaph was affixed to the marble shortly thereafter: A STAR ON EARTH—A STAR IN HEAVEN.

  EPILOGUE

  A SONG FOR YOU

  OCTOBER 8, 1996. Karen Carpenter’s dream of becoming recognized as a solo artist was realized, albeit too late for her to experience and enjoy. Sixteen years had passed since she and Phil Ramone delivered the solo album to A&M Records, where it was scrutinized and sent to the vaults. It had also been some thirteen years since her untimely passing. Since the album was shelved in 1980, and particularly after her death in 1983, fans had been relentless in pushing for the album’s release. They hoped that Karen would find some sort of posthumous vindication once the album made it onto record store shelves.

  “People are really driving me crazy about the album,” Richard had told Ramone several years earlier.

  “Well, then why don’t you put it out?” he urged.

  Aside from Karen’s, Ramone had never produced an album deemed unworthy of release, and the rejection weighed heavy on him. “Sixteen years of not having it out on the street made it very frustrating for me,” he explains. “There were people who thought it was a disgrace or some crazy, silly album.”

  Prior to 1996 Richard had remixed several of Karen’s solo tracks for a Carpenters album in 1989, then two others on a 1991 box set. The mixes were extremely well done and executed with Ramone’s blessing, but he was afraid Karen’s vision for the solo recordings might be lost if the entire project were subjected to this form of musical facelift. “We could have easily fixed them up and modernized them and changed some of the parts,” Ramone says. “But personally, I like to think of it like a painting. It was done at a particular time, with Karen being the artist. . . . The solo album was something she really, really cared about, and as a friend who cared about her, I thought we should put out everything the way she wanted it.”

  The resulting eponymous album, Karen Carpenter, contained the eleven original recordings as approved by Karen in 1980, plus “Last One Singin’ the Blues,” an unmixed bonus track. “I have not remixed or done anything to the tapes,” Ramone announced in the press release from A&M Records. “These mixes, the material and style, are the way Karen approved them. . . . As years passed, both Richard Carpenter and I wondered when it might be released. Together we stand proud as this was a piece that meant so much to Karen, it was truly a labor of love.”

  Contributing to the album liner notes, Richard declared, “Karen was with us precious little time. She was a great artist. This album reflects a certain period and change of approach in her career. As such it deserves to be heard, in its entirety, as originally delivered.”

  Prior to the album’s release, Richard had phoned Itchie in hopes that she might unearth the album’s original dedication. After consulting the notes she had saved from the project, she called him back: “Dedicated to my brother Richard with all my heart.” According to Itchie, he bawled into the phone.

  Despite the apparent change of heart, Richard did little to promote the album on Karen’s behalf. “When it was released I thought Richard would get behind it,” Ramone says. “That was the reason I said ‘
release it.’ He didn’t have to embrace it, but some of the interviews didn’t give you the feeling of he had changed his mind.”

  Reviews for Karen Carpenter were mixed. Some reviewers made unreasonable comparisons to the Carpenters’ biggest hits, as illustrated by David Brown in his “C+” review for Entertainment Weekly: “For anyone accustomed to hearing her virginal delivery on mope-pop standards like ‘Goodbye to Love,’ few things will be more disconcerting than the sound of Karen Carpenter loving to love you, baby.”

  Others reviewed the album without bias or preconception, like Tierney Smith of Goldmine, who cited Karen’s warm and expressive vocals as the record’s saving grace. “She brings a sweetness to the buoyant, gently ringing pop of Peter Cetera’s ‘Making Love in the Afternoon,’ shines on the lovely understated country ballad ‘All Because of You’ and sounds right at home with the infectious mellow pop of ‘Guess I Just Lost My Head.’”

  Reviewing Karen’s songs for Rolling Stone, Rob Hoerburger praised Ramone for recording her in what he called “leaner, decidedly unsaccharine settings . . . her vocals come damn close to soulful. Listening to them, it becomes apparent why singers like Chrissie Hynde, Madonna and Gloria Estefan have ‘come out of the closet’ and admitted they were Karen fans.”

  Paul Grein felt the album was not in any way the definitive portrait of Karen Carpenter, “nor was it intended to be,” he clarified. “It is a provocative snapshot of her at the age of twenty-nine. Future projects, with Richard or other producers and artists, would have revealed still more facets of this complex woman and multidimensional artist.”

  Hoerberger agreed that, while it may not have been the album to define Karen Carpenter’s career, it was on par with contemporaneous albums. “It holds up with anything that like-minded singers—Barbra Streisand and Olivia Newton-John—were recording at the time, and especially with anything the Carpenters put out immediately before or after. If there is no ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ on the album, it doesn’t really matter. Fans typically crave an artist’s most personal work—even if it isn’t a masterpiece. . . . [It] ends up a cherished souvenir from the collection of a woman who was never allowed more than a vacation from her own image.”

  THE WORLD in 1983 was not ready for Karen Carpenter the album—perhaps in 1980 but not 1983. For a period of several years following her death, appreciation for Karen’s music went underground. The mere mention of her name would incite remarks like, “What a waste!” Or even questions like, “Wasn’t she that singer who killed herself?” The tragedy appeared to have triumphed over the talent, and it would be years before this injustice would begin to unravel.

  Within eight weeks of his sister’s death, Richard Carpenter had returned to the recording studios at A&M Records, where he worked meticulously on what would become Voice of the Heart, a collection of outtakes and other previously unreleased songs, including several from Karen’s last recording session in 1982. “It actually made the time a little bit easier,” Richard shared with Paul Grein for Billboard. “I think if I’d just stayed home, it would have been that much more difficult. I felt strongly that the material shouldn’t be stuck away on a shelf. Putting myself in a fan’s position—if I’d never met Karen—I’d want to hear it.”

  Coinciding with the album’s release, the Carpenters’ star was unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on October 12, 1983. “This is a very sad day and at the same time a very special and beautiful day for my family and me,” Richard told the 250 or so gathered for the occasion. “My only regret is that Karen is not physically here to share it with us, however I know she is very much alive in our minds and in our hearts.” Their star, number 1,769, can be found at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard, just steps away from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

  Fueled by an intense television ad campaign, Yesterday Once More, a double-album set featuring twenty-four Carpenters hits, was issued in 1984. Its success prompted a tie-in video released the following year. The fourteen selections were compiled from various television appearances and promotional videos.

  Richard released his first solo album, Time, in 1987, which featured his own lead vocals on six tracks and guest vocals by Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield. “Something in Your Eyes,” recorded by Springfield, became a Top 20 hit on the adult contemporary charts. Richard’s multitracked, a cappella tribute to Karen, “When Time Was All We Had,” featured Herb Alpert on flugelhorn.

  That same year, little-known filmmaker Todd Haynes directed and produced Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a 16 mm, 43-minute film with a cast of Barbie-type dolls shot against a backdrop of miniature interiors. At first glance the film may have appeared to be a kitschy piece of mockery, but closer examination revealed a serious and sometimes touching and sympathetic account of Karen’s life. Shown primarily at film festivals and small theaters throughout the United States, Superstar, nicknamed “the Barbie doll movie,” garnered a huge underground following and by the year 2000 had earned a place at #45 on the Entertainment Weekly list of “Top 50 Cult Films of All Time.”

  Prior to the film’s release, Haynes had attempted to license a number of original Carpenters recordings and other music for the production, but his requests were denied. When he proceeded to use the material for which he was denied permission, legal injunctions from Richard Carpenter ensued, and the film was withdrawn from distribution in 1990. In an open letter to Richard, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly asked, “Will you please allow people to see Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story?” and called it “one of the most startling, audacious and sheerly emotional films of the past decade.” Gleiberman asserted that the film was not just a case study but a tribute to the duo’s musical legacy. “Todd Haynes has turned Karen Carpenter’s life into a singular work of art. Even for those who never cared about the Carpenters’ music (but especially for those who did), it deserves to be seen.”

  In Richard’s response, which appeared in the publication the following month, he explained that his issue with the film related not to its content but to the filmmaker’s behavior. The fact remained that Haynes had distributed the film to numerous theaters after having been denied permission to utilize the Carpenters’ recordings. According to Richard, “His decision to make his movie using this material amounted to a deliberate attack on the rights of those who Gleiberman now suggests ought to give their blessing to Haynes’s exhibition of the movie.”

  The catalyst for a sweeping renaissance of interest in Karen’s story and the music of the Carpenters came on January 1, 1989, with the premiere of The Karen Carpenter Story on CBS-TV. The revival has continued in varying degrees to this day. The New Year’s Day airing took advantage of a captive holiday viewing audience, and the movie finished in first place for its rating week with 41 percent of televisions tuned in. It was the highest-rated television movie licensed by CBS in five years and second most watched for all of 1989, behind I Know My First Name Is Steven. “Carpenters Telepic Boosts Record Sales” reported Variety. According to their research, sales of the Carpenters’ catalog soared some 400 percent in the two weeks immediately following the broadcast on CBS. Absent from record store shelves was a tie-in or soundtrack release. Two previously unreleased recordings debuted in the film, “You’re the One” and “Where Do I Go from Here,” outtakes from 1977 and 1978 respectively. Both appeared on Lovelines, a new Carpenters album released ten months later in October.

  There had been more than twenty years of jibes and sneers—two decades of dismissing even Karen’s best recordings as bland, homogenized, or saccharine sweet—but with the airing of this low-budget dramatization, prejudice against the Carpenters’ recordings began to fade, revealing an extraordinary change in perception. Over time, Karen found her rightful home alongside other timeless vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and Sarah Vaughan. Not just that, but retro was in. At times it seemed almost cool to like the Carpenters. “Maybe it’s just an overdue appreciation of a singer who, despite some terrible material, a
lways had a pure pop voice,” wrote Stephen Whitty in an article for the San Jose Mercury News. “Or maybe it’s simply a twinge of ’70s nostalgia. For baby boomers in their twenties, ‘Close to You’ was part of their AM-radio childhoods. But the Carpenters are back. And it’s only just begun. Again.”

  The revival made its way from the United States to the United Kingdom, where in 1990 a “greatest hits” compilation, Only Yesterday, held the #1 spot for a total of seven weeks. Carpenters tribute acts surfaced in the United Kingdom as well. One featuring vocalist Wendy Roberts was even praised by Richard Carpenter, who was amazed to learn the act had sold out the London Palladium, just as the Carpenters had (many times over) in 1976.

  Next came The Carpenters: The Untold Story, an authorized biography by former Melody Maker editor-in-chief Ray Coleman, who previously authored books about Eric Clapton, the Beatles, and others. Bound by restraints similar to those imposed on the writers of the 1989 TV movie, the author skirted around certain subjects and overlooked others altogether in order to craft a book deemed worthy of the Carpenter family’s stamp of approval. That same year, it was Coleman who proclaimed the musical duo “too good to be through” in a feature for The Sunday Times in London. “There is little doubt that Karen would have enjoyed all the commotion,” he wrote. “Fiercely ambitious, professional and proud, she was hurt by the taunts on the way up and would have loved the irony of being considered retro-cool.”

  That retro-cool acceptance of the Carpenters’ product was certainly a long time coming. “It was a transformation in taste that took twenty years,” wrote Sue Cummings in Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, calling it a “renewed ironic appreciation. [Listeners] had loved the veneer, then hated it, then found it even more compelling, on a second look, for the complexity in the places where the darkness cracked through.”