One evening in 1981, the popular BBC1 program Nationwide broadcast an interview with one of the most popular music groups of the time: The Carpenters, a squeaky-clean duo consisting of velvet singer Karen and her brother Richard.
They were interviewed by Sue Lawley and fans were no doubt expecting to hear about new record releases and concerts the American couple had planned. Instead, viewers saw a painfully thin, gaunt and frail-looking Karen sitting on a sofa – her large brown eyes staring intently out of her sunken face.
Lawley asked the question directly: Was the reason Karen hadn’t recorded or toured recently because she “suffered from the slimming disease called anorexia nervosa”?
Forty years ago, it was a condition that most people had not heard of and that few understood.
Karen, then 31, immediately became defensive. “No, I was just pooped…tired,” she protested.
DUO: Singers Karen and Richard Carpenter of the Carpenters pose for a portrait in Los Angeles, California in 1981
AWARD-WINNING: Photo of Karen in 1977 at the Los Angeles Billboard Music Awards Carpenters posing with Emmyiou Harris
Her brother, who was sitting next to her, entered hastily. He called for a stop to filming and claimed that Karen’s eating problems were a thing of the past. When the interview began again, there was no mention of Karen’s weight or her gaunt appearance.
Sixteen months later, Karen was dead. Her death, a later inquest determined, was due to heart failure as a result of anorexia.
More than four decades later, a new book and documentary reassess the life and legacy of one of the world’s most famous singers, who was the first celebrity to suffer from an eating disorder and whose death gave a face to anorexia that drew widespread attention and research, for which many young people today can be grateful for.
This awkward BBC encounter is revisited in the documentary Karen Carpenter: Starving For Perfection, which reveals new insights into the singer’s life and legacy. British author Lucy O’Brien’s recently published biography Lead Sister: The Story Of Karen Carpenter also re-examines Karen’s battle with anorexia and body dysmorphia, which saw her consume up to 90 laxatives at once and drop her weight to less than five and a half stone .
So what drove this smart, talented and beautiful young woman to starve herself?
Contrary to popular belief that fame and public scrutiny are to blame, those close to the Carpenter family claim that the cause of Karen’s problems was an overbearing, perfectionist mother who clearly favored her “musically genius” brother Richard.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, Randy Schmidt, writer and producer of the documentary, said: “One of Karen’s closest friends told me that there was a hole in Karen’s heart where a mother’s love should have been but couldn’t be. “ filled with the love of friends or even millions of adoring fans around the world, and in the end she almost wanted to disappear – to make herself smaller and smaller.
“I believe her family loved her in their own way, but Karen needed something different, and it is unfortunate that their love for each other was so unequal.”
Born in Connecticut in 1950 to middle-class parents, Karen was three years younger than her brother Richard, a child piano prodigy who began arranging music at age 12. Her mother, Agnes, often bragged that her son was a musical genius, and Karen idolized him.
In 1963, the family moved to California to support teenage Richard’s budding music career. There, Karen discovered her first musical love and played drums in her high school’s marching band. Karen was a typical chubby teenager and Richard teased her by calling her “fat.” Her mother described Karen as having a “strong bottom” and when she was 17, she took her then healthy daughter, 10 and 1.70 meters, to the doctor about her weight.
She was switched to the Stillman Water Diet, a high-protein, low-carb diet popular in the 1960s that included vitamin supplements and drinking eight glasses of water a day.
MUMMY DEAREST: Karen Carpenter with her mother Agnes at Christmas, 1982
After six months, Karen had lost 25 pounds, but her relationship with food and her self-image were irrevocably damaged.
“That was the beginning of Karen counting calories and exercising every day. “She was determined to stick with it,” says Lucy O’Brien. “It started to see food as the enemy, and I think that embedded itself in Karen’s psyche.”
The driving force behind this obsession, explains Randy Schmidt, was Karen and Richard’s perfectionist mother. “Karen joked that the floor of her garage was so clean you could eat off of it. Her mother scrubbed the window fittings of her house with a toothbrush and when she noticed that her neighbors’ windows were dirty, she went and cleaned them too.
“Karen and Richard learned from a young age to strive for perfection in everything.” It’s not a bad thing if it’s regulated. But as the people in the documentary say, perfection is impossible and you’re constantly disappointing yourself if that’s the goal.”
The brother and sister signed with A&M Records and their first hit single, released in 1969, was a cover of The Beatles’ “Ticket To Ride.” After the label realized the true value of her alto voice – described by some as that of an angel – they began to steer Karen away from drumming, her greatest love and – poignantly – an instrument to hide behind.
In the early 1970s, she stood alone in front of the stage with a microphone and was watched by millions of eyes.
With timeless classics like Rainy Days And Mondays and Yesterday Once More, they sold 100 million records worldwide.
While appearing with Richard on The Bob Hope Special in 1973, Karen saw pictures of herself in her gold stage suit. She had a barely noticeable stomach, but told her brother that she looked heavy and that she planned to do something about it.
“Karen was always worried about her weight, but when I first met her she wasn’t anorexic,” recalls Maria Luisa Galeazzi, who worked as Karen’s personal assistant and as a hairdresser and makeup artist. She remembers regularly going out to dinner with Karen and Richard and Karen complaining, “You two can eat anything without gaining a pound.”
“But she ate normally. She loved to cook and at Christmas we spent a day baking cookies.”
However, her relationship with her mother remained anything but normal. While her father was a quiet man who kept in the background, “her mother was in charge and Karen couldn’t please her mother.” “Richard wasn’t teased as much as Karen.”
Galeazzi and Richard had a romance, but it was cut short when Karen informed her assistant that her services were no longer needed. Galeazzi believes it was the siblings’ mother.
Richard married his adopted first cousin, with whom he had five children.
Drummer Cubby O’Brien joined the Carpenters in 1972 when they were on the rise with hits like Close To You. At first, Karen hid her weight loss well, he says. “It was hard to tell that something was wrong because Karen was wearing sweatpants and sweatshirts – multiple layers of clothing.” It was only in the evening dress that you could tell she was getting thinner.
“She was eating salads and moving the food around on her plate. I think she thought it was the only thing she could control, but we didn’t know it was a serious problem. Us boys in the group would never say anything. I think Richard knew and was worried about her. Friends like Olivia Newton-John, Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick have spoken to her friend to friend.’
ICONS: More than four decades later, a new book and documentary reassess the life and legacy of one of the world’s most famous singers, who was the first celebrity to suffer from an eating disorder and whose death gave a face to anorexia. It sparked widespread attention and research, for which many young people can be grateful today
According to the documentary, Karen’s weight dropped to 2.7 kilograms and the audience gasped when she took the stage, fearing she might have cancer.
“I think it was a form of attention-grabbing, even if it became negative and people said, ‘You don’t look good.'” She was able to control something in her life – Richard controlled a lot, her mother controlled a lot, the record companies controlled a lot, and this was one of the few moments in Karen’s life when she dared to try to become independent. “She was a rebel in many ways,” says Schmidt.
Further pressure was the duo’s squeaky-clean, all-American image in the rebellious era of Vietnam protests, the Watergate scandal and hard rock.
“Because we were brother and sister, we were mocked up, down, backwards and forwards… No one was after the music, but they criticized our clothes, our hair… they criticized our audience because families came,” Karen says in one of the newly discovered interviews.
What most people didn’t know was that Richard had his own problems. He suffered from insomnia, panic attacks and depression, became addicted to sleeping pills and once fell asleep at his piano. It was an addiction that he finally broke free of after rehab.
Further unhappiness for Karen resulted from her inability to find lasting love. But in 1980, it seemed as if she had finally had her happy ending when she married self-proclaimed real estate mogul Tom Burris.
Her former assistant Maria Luisa Galeazzi remembers meeting Karen shortly before the wedding: “She was so thin that I had to look at her twice, but she seemed happy and invited me to her wedding party and the ceremony.” She was beautiful that day, but she didn’t look happy.”
It later emerged that Burris told his future wife, who wanted children, three days before their wedding day that he had had a vasectomy and would not be reversing it.
“If I had known what an idiot her husband was, I would have dragged her from the altar,” Galeazzi says.
Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last. In 1982, newly separated and painfully thin Karen flew to New York and placed herself in the hands of psychotherapist Steven Levenkron, against the wishes of her family, who believed she could be “fixed” by a Beverly Hills doctor.
She arrived in New York with 22 suitcases full of clothes and shoes and checked into a hotel with a friend for support.
During treatment, Karen Levenkron admitted that she could take up to 90 laxatives at once and admitted to taking up to ten thyroid medications per day. It was later learned that she had also unknowingly poisoned herself with an overdose of a syrup that induced vomiting.
Karen made some progress in understanding the causes of her illness through intensive therapy sessions, but still couldn’t gain enough weight. Suspecting that his patient was still secretly taking laxatives, Levenkron asked Karen to put on a bikini and look at herself in the mirror as a new tactic. “Karen was like a skeleton, but she couldn’t see anything wrong. “She thought she was gaining weight,” explains Lucy O’Brien. “This is body dysmorphia – the thinner Karen was, the fatter she felt.”
In the fall of 1982, Karen weighed 5 pounds and when she told the psychotherapist that her heart was “beating funny,” she was hospitalized. Over the next seven weeks, she gained 20 pounds through intravenous feeding and eating small meals. Believing she was cured, she filed for divorce and returned to Los Angeles. In January, she attended a gathering of Grammy Award winners, but it was her last public appearance. On February 4, 1983, she was found dead in her parents’ home. She had suffered from heart failure due to complications from anorexia.
Tragically, drummer Cubby O’Brien recalls her optimism and determination in her final days: “I spoke to Karen just a few days before she died and she was in good spirits.” She was in the studio recording. “She felt good.”
“She didn’t want to die,” says documentary filmmaker Randy Schmidt. “She told people she was going to ‘beat this thing’ and she was looking forward to the next chapter of her life.”
“I think if she had had the opportunities that people with eating disorders have now, she would still be here and would have contributed so much more to music,” adds Lucy O’Brien. “The lesson is that there is help available, and part of that is thanks to Karen.”
- Karen Carpenter: Starving For Perfection is showing at film festivals and its creators are currently negotiating with streaming companies for wider distribution. Lead Sister, The Story Of Karen Carpenter, by Lucy O’Brien, published by Nine Eight Books, price £22.