Karen Carpenter, one half of the brother-sister duo The Carpenters, and the velvet voice behind
hits like "Close to You" and "Top of the World," enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in the 1970s
only to literally disappear before her fans' very eyes.
This is the tragic real-life story of Karen Carpenter.
Karen Carpenter was born in 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Her family moved to Downey, California when she was 13-years-old.
By then it was clear that her older brother, Richard, was a piano prodigy.
It was also clear that he was their mother's favorite child.
In an excerpt from the biography Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter, author
Randy L. Schmidt suggests that Karen's struggle with both bulimia and anorexia was in part
a direct response to knowing that her mother, Agnes, didn't really love her.
Not like she loved Richard, anyway.
Karen couldn't control her mother's affections, but she could control her food intake.
"She just seemed determined to lose weight.
She wanted to be thin like you see the models and everybody are."
The Irish Independent makes clear that Agnes was more concerned with outward appearances
than she was with Karen's mental health.
In a therapy session following her first hospitalization for anorexia, Karen's family was asked to
tell her they loved her.
Her father and brother did so readily.
Agnes, on the other hand, dodged the request and chastised the therapist for referring
to her by her first name, a habit she considered tactless.
Karen liked to sing and dance, but as a young girl, she never got the kind of encouragement
and praise her brother did.
When she joined Richard's band just after high school, she wasn't even considered for
the front woman role.
Instead, she was thrown behind the drum kit.
When that band broke up is when Richard suggested to Karen they take on the world as a brother-sister
duo.
Their big break came quickly.
In 1969, they signed with A&M Records, and while their first album, Offering, was a relative
flop, their second, Close to You, was a triumph.
They found themselves celebrated all over the country.
Radio listeners loved the pair's gentle-on-the-ears sound — but Karen's voice, much more than
Richard's tinkling of the ivories, took center stage.
Richard, used to the spotlight, wasn't always thrilled with his sister's notoriety.
In fact, he was quite jealous.
According to Little Girl Blue, when Karen recorded a solo album in 1980, Richard ridiculed
the record, and the album was shelved.
It wasn't released until after Karen's death in 1983.
Karen started dieting when she was a teenager.
At five foot, four inches and 145 pounds, she was often told she looked chubby.
She began her efforts to lose weight with the Stillman diet, a carb-restrictive plan
on which she quickly lost twenty pounds.
Soon, though, Karen moved on.
She went on diet after diet, shedding pounds, hiring a personal trainer, and eventually
resorting to taking laxatives, thyroid medication, and expectorants to maintain a trim figure.
At first, friends were supportive of the weight loss.
When she got down to 110 pounds, from a high of 165, they told her she looked great.
As Karen continued to shrink, though, people around her grew alarmed.
Fans worried she might have cancer.
According to Time, audience members audibly gasped when she came out on stage, her hip
bones jutting through the thin gowns she preferred at the time.
A critic with Variety ignored her performance and focused instead on her looks, while her
own husband dismissed her as a, quote, "bag of bones."
Most of the people in Karen's support system thought she simply needed to consume more
calories.
No one understood that she was suffering from a very real disorder, anorexia nervosa.
Her bandmate, John Bettis, admitted that he didn't even know how to pronounce "anorexia"
until Karen had been suffering from it for five years, and that her issues with food
came down not to weight but to control.
"There were rumors that you were suffering from the slimmer's disease, from anorexia
nervosa.
Is that right?"
"No, I was just pooped."
Anorexia was a way for Karen to exercise control over her own affairs, but because both medical
and mental health professionals didn't know how eating disorders worked, it took longer
than it should have for her to get the help she needed.
By the time she did receive proper treatment, it was too late.
The young woman who once saw herself as too fat was now being criticized for being too
skinny.
She simply could not win.
Tragically, when, in the winter of 1983, she began to pursue a healthier lifestyle, gradually
regaining the weight she'd lost, her heart — damaged from years of near starvation
and drug abuse — could not support her larger frame.
In 1975, Richard and Karen were poised to head out on their very first world tour, the
50 dates of which sold out in a matter of hours.
It soon became clear, however, that Karen was too ill to travel.
Her weight had plummeted, and she was spending 14 hours a day in bed.
Karen's doctors at the time refused to let her take part in the tour, and it was cancelled.
According to Little Girl Blue, Richard and Karen probably lost around $250,000 as a result.
Karen was racked with guilt over the inconvenience suffered by her record company and, of course,
ticket holders, all of whom had their purchase refunded.
Had the tour taken place, it was almost certain to have been a record-setter.
Estimates suggested it would have grossed $1.2 million.
In 1975.
On one hand, the anxiety over the cancellation was the last thing Karen needed.
On the other, it was clear that she was too exhausted to handle the grueling nature of
overseas touring.
Richard and A&M executive Terry Ellis traveled to London and Tokyo to publicly apologize
for the cancellation.
During a press conference, Ellis blamed Karen, and Karen's gender, for the fall-out.
He said:
"Girls just can't take that life without something going wrong."
He later walked back the remark.
Having achieved incredible professional success by her early twenties, Karen wanted only two
things to make her life complete: true love and a family of her own.
She thought she was getting exactly what she hoped for in Thomas Burris, a 39-year-old
real estate developer she met in June of 1980.
She and Burris had a whirlwind romance and, much to the shock and dismay of some of Karen's
friends, they decided to marry that August.
Burris was handsome and, judging by his lavish lifestyle, very successful.
Karen was completely infatuated.
The infatuation didn't last long.
According to The Guardian, Burris confessed just days before the wedding to having had
a vasectomy years earlier.
Karen was distraught.
She'd hoped Burris would make her a mother.
She called her own mother, Agnes, to tell her the wedding was off.
Agnes, however, was more concerned with the money she'd personally spent on the upcoming
nuptials.
She told her she had made her bed and should lie in it.
And lie in it Karen did.
She submitted meekly to Burris' physical and mental abuse and watched helplessly as he
drained her bank account.
She ended the marriage after barely a year, brokenhearted, childless, and robbed not only
of her fortune but her belief in love.
As if Karen's story weren't sad enough, she also had to contend with obsessed fans honing
into her private life.
She referred to the more difficult cases as, quote, "the strangies," and said:
"They ask for advice that I'm not capable of giving.
Because I'm not a doctor.
It's hard to tell someone how to live their life even if you know 'em, let alone if you've
never seen them."
At one performance in Dallas, a man rushed the stage and sat down at Karen's drum kit.
When it was clear he was a crasher, police escorted him from the stage.
He fought them the whole way, insisting he was Karen's fiance.
He was only the tip of the iceberg.
At the height of The Carpenters' popularity, an endless line of men randomly showed up
at Karen's parents' home in Downey, California, asking for her.
One ended his vigil by screaming her name over and over again.
But what seemed to weigh most heavily on Carpenter's thin shoulders was serving as a role model
for young people.
She told Rolling Stone:
"I mean ... we only wanted to ... make a little music ..."
One of the saddest facts of Karen's melancholy life is that, when she died in 1983 of heart
failure, she seemed to be on the mend.
According to the biography The Carpenters: The Untold Story: An Authorized Biography,
the day before she died could not have been more typically boring and suburban.
She spent the day shopping for a washer-dryer and the evening with her parents.
The three of them had dinner at Big Boy and then settled in to watch bad TV together.
Conspicuously absent from her final hours was the drama surrounding what her family
referred to as her, quote, "over-dieting."
She even ate a few tacos while she watched TV.
At the time she was a healthy 110 pounds, up from the 80 she weighed during her last
hospital stay.
Her brother had every reason to believe she was on her way to recovery after an eight-year
battle with anorexia.
He and Karen were in the midst of recording their 12th album, Voice of the Heart.
Karen died on the floor of her room in her parent's California home.
Her heart, weakened from years of starvation dieting and abuse of the expectorant Ipecac,
finally gave out.
In the seventies, the Carpenters were, to borrow the title of one of their most popular
tunes, on top of the world.
They'd taken over the radio waves with a squeaky clean slate of hits like "Close to You," "Superstar,"
and "We've Only Just Begun," and they'd scored a couple of Grammy awards.
The brother-sister duo were steadily gaining a loyal fanbase, thanks to their easy listening
style and Karen's smooth-as-molasses contralto.
Then, the eighties hit and their popularity began to wane, partially because both Richard
and Karen were fighting private demons, in his case an addiction to Quaaludes and in
hers, anorexia nervosa.
But they were also facing a very real shift in the public's musical taste.
Hair bands and heavy metal were in, sweet tunes about birds magically appearing and
newfound love were out.
Regardless of who was to blame for The Carpenters' star falling, music fans continue to disagree
about their legacy.
While many weigh in on the side that they were too cheesy to be taken seriously, the
other side, which includes Paul McCartney and Rolling Stone, swear that they were the
real deal.
In 1989, six years after Karen's death, CBS released the made-for-TV movie The Karen Carpenter
Story.
As Time makes clear, the docudrama, while largely enjoyable, refuses to dig very deeply
into the nuances of Karen's too-short life, opting instead for easy, obvious moments.
"Come on, you said I was in charge."
"Not about my pizza."
"I'm doing you a favor, in 10 or 20 years, Mom and Dad are going to let you date, and
you don't wanna get fat, do you?"
The movie ends with Karen smiling into the camera.
So even though she's about to die on the floor of her room, all's right with the world?
Some critics think she got better treatment in Todd Haynes' pulls-no-punches, Barbie-helmed
short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
Yes, Karen is Barbie, and Richard is Ken.
The other characters are, likewise, portrayed by dolls.
Superstar takes aim at Richard Nixon — whom the Carpenters performed for while the Vietnam
War raged — as well as Agnes, and the, quote, "fascism" that lies at the heart of American
capitalism.
Richard Carpenter successfully sued Haynes in 1990 for using several Carpenters songs
without permission and for suggesting Richard might be a closeted homosexual.
As a result, the film is now banned.
In January 2017, Richard Carpenter also sued his and Karen's former record company, A&M,
and Universal Music Group for cheating them — well, him — out of the royalties associated
with digital downloads.
According to Variety, Carpenter took the companies to task for breach of contract, arguing that
he'd only received a, quote, "minuscule fraction" of the digital royalties owed him.
Chocking up the issue to multiple accounting errors on the part of A&M and Universal, Richard
asked the court to reward him and Karen's estate $2 million in compensatory damages.
Richard based part of his argument on the success he and Karen shared with their record
companies, saying:
"The Carpenters recordings are among the best sellers in the history of popular music and
after 48 years continue to contribute a substantial amount to UMG/A&M's annual bottom line.
It seems only fair that these companies account fairly to my sister's estate and to me."
The case was settled out of court.
No terms were divulged.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.