by: Eric Levin
February 21, 1983
 Iced tea was the hardest drink she consumed, and the only
needles she used were for needlepoint. Her weirdest
stash was a collection of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. The
flagrant comet tail of self-indulgence so familiar in plummeting
stars like Elvis Presley and John Belushi did not mark Karen
Carpenter's life--or her death of heart failure on February
4 at
the age of 32. Yet for all the soothing middle-of-the-road
appeal she and her composer-arranger brother, Richard, 37,
brought to 41 Carpenters records--which have sold 80 million
copies and won three Grammy Awards--she had led a long, lonely
struggle against another form of self-destruction, anorexia
nervosa.
She collapsed at about 9 a.m. in the wardrobe closet of
the room her parents have always kept for her at the family
home is suburban Downey, Ca., about 30 minutes from Los Angeles. Downey
firemen entered the closet to find Karen slumped nude of
the floor, her nightgown draping her body. She had
apparently just begun to dress for the day. at the
request of the rescue workers, Karen's grief-stricken mother,
Agnes, was escorted from the room by husband Harold.
The rescuers at first detected a faint pulse in Karen's
neck that made them think, says paramedic Bob Gillis, that "she
had a good chance to survive." But then she went
into cardiac arrest. Racing over from his house a few
minutes away, Richard Carpenter arrived just before the paramedics
carried his siter out to the ambulance. Despite continuous
efforts to resuscitate her, Karen was pronounced dead at
Downey Community Hospital at 9:51 a.m.
A wave of grief spread among those who had known her. "She
was a magical person with a magical voice," says Burt
Bacharach, who in 1963 had written the song which became
the Carpenters' first hit, Close to You. Adds Paul
Williams, aothor of their second gold smash, We've Only Just
Begun: "Karen and Richar's music brought the
American family together during a period when there was very
little else it could share." WIlliams' apparent
reference to the turbulent Vietnam and Watergate eras was
apt. The Carpenters were at their zenith in 1973, when
then President RIchard Nixon introduced the duo to a glittering
White House audience as "young America at its very best."
 In
the aftershock, friends wondered if Karen had tried too hard
to live up to that description, had perhaps died trying. Hers
was the "good girl's" disease--a compulsive urge
to control weight, primarily among female hyperachievers,
that leads to such extremes as self-induced vomiting and
taking huge doses of laxatives.
An autopsy revealed no immediate explanation for her heart
failure.
But after a long bout with anorexia, says Dr. Joel Yager
of UCLA's Eating Disorders Clinic, "the most common
cause of death is low serum potassium, which can cause an
irregularity in the heartbeat."
Karen had spent almost all of 1982 in New York undergoing
treatment, and had lifted her weight from a gaunt 85 to 108
pounds--very near normal for her frame and height, 5'4". But,
as anorexia expert Dr. Raymond Vath of Seattle points out,
doctors learned only two months ago that the greatest strain
is put on an anorectic's heart when lost weight is regained.
Paul Bloch, the Carpenter family's PR man, downplays the
anorexia connection. "Karen was a vibrant and
energetic person,"
he insists. Concurs Gil Friesen, president of A&M
Records, the Carpenters' label, "Karen was the girl
next door, always up even when she was down." typical
signs of anorectics, says Dr. Yager. "It's common
for them to be sweet,"
he says. "Many keep their emotions inside.
They take care of other people, but they don't take care
of themselves.
"Karen's condition was alarmingly obvious. A co-worker
who had seen her early last year said she resemble "a
living skull." Added another, "She appeared
to be a tormented and unhappy woman."
Indeed, as far back as 1971, when the Carpenters were soaring
on their early hits, Karen was "psychotic about her
weight,"
an acquaintance recalls. "She had a classic pear-shaped
figure--she was chubby, and she was very self-conscious about
it."
Tom Burris, the real estate developer whom Karen married
in 1980 and from whom she was separated last year, says she
was suffering from anorexia "for about nine years." The
term, though, was not widely known in 1975, when Karen slipped
frighteningly from her performing weight of 110 to a shadowy
90 pounds.
It took two months of bed rest at home to recuperate from
physical and nervous exhaustion brought on by some 250 days
a year of arduous touring. "It was sickening," she
told PEOPLE after getting back on her feet the next year. "Suddenly
it wasn't fun anymore."
Though much had changed in her life by 1981, Karen was still
taking a vengeful attitude toward her weight. DIstraught,
she reached out to Pat Boone's daughter, Cherry Boone O'Neill,
who was finishing a book about her own anorexia, Starving
for Attention. They spoke once in person, then three
times on the telephone.
"She didn't sound panicked, but she felt that she really
needed some help," recalls Cherry, now 28. "Karen
was having particular problems with laxatives. She
could not believe she could ever get to a point where she
was not dependent on them."
O'Neill, who herself had often taken laxatives by the box
to "drop 10-15 pounds overnight," urged her friend
to "get away from the pressures of L.A. and show business
and concentrate on her own life and survival." She
told Cherry: "I'm going to do it. I'll get
well--it's just so damn hard."
Like Cherry, Karen was raised in an unusually close-knit
family.
The children of a printer and a homemaker, Karen and Richard
moved with their parents from New Haven, CT to Downey in
1963. "Karen grew up in a very tight, parentally
dominated world," says a longtime friend. "Her
parents are very nice people, but they controlled her early
life and continued to try and do so over the years." One
incident from early in Karen and Richard's career may be
typical. Agnes Carpenter called her offspring at their
Cincinnati motel to scold them for not having signed autographs
backstage following a show in Hershey, Pa. after a fan wrote
to complain. Dutifully, the youngsters called the fan
and apologized.
Anorexics, notes Cherry, are usually the children of authoritative
parents. "Such a person," she says, "does
not rebel."
Richard was the first to take up music, inspired by his "Three
B's--the Beatles, Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach." A
sports fan, Karen was handed a glockenspiel in the high school
marching band and figured it out. Wielding chopsticks
on bar stools, she eventually taught herself percussion well
enough to tap along with Dave Brubeck's rhythmically challenging
album, Time Further Out. The duo won a Hollywood Bowl
Battle of the Bands, and after three years of scrounging
for work were signed by A&M co-sounder Herb Alpert.
"It was interesting the way they made records," a
close colleague observes. "Richard laid out all
the basic tracks, and then Karen would come in and sing. He
was a tyrant in the studio. She would spend a lot of
time on her vocals, and was always hard on herself." An
ex-employee of A&M agrees: "It always seemed
as if she were under Richard's thumb."
Barry Manilow observes that Karen clearly "adored" Richard.
"She couldn't speak highly enough of him. To her
he was a genius." Yet it was clearly Karen's voice
that made the Carpenters click. "I'm sure she
felt she had to measure up, that the whole act kind of hinged
on her," Cherry O'Neill says. "That's an
awful lot of pressure for one individual."
Karen's apparent solution, suggests Cherry, was classic:
"When you start denying yourself food, and begin feeling
you have control over a life that has been pretty much controlled
for you, it's exhilarating. The anorectic feels that
while she may not be able to control anything else, she will,
by God, control every morsel that goes in her mouth."
Karen's anorectic episodes in the '70's seems to have waxed
and waned, and in 1976, after her two-month recuperation
at home, she made a stab at independence from her parents
by moving into her own large apartment in a Century City
condo. In 1980 her mother urged Karen to attend a dinner
at the chic Ma Maison restaurant that Karen wanted to skip,
and there she met Tom Burris, a 39-year-old divorce with
an 18-year-old son. Two months later they were engaged.
Although Burris insists "We always got along, always
cared about each other," they soon grew apart. "Karen
was dealing with her anorexia and her career, I was dealing
with my real estate problems," he explains. "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."
Later Karen reached out to the physician who treated Cherry
O'Neill, Dr. Vath of Seattle. "She wanted a quick
fix," he recalls. "She told me she had all
these contracts and just had to get well. But I said,
'No, Karen, we don't know how to treat this rapidly. It
would take a minimum of a year, probably three, to get you
well. Finally she agreed to a course of treatment in a New
York hospital, where she took two-hour treatments every day
for nearly a year. But even there, as Dionne Warwick
discovered, Karen's weight rose faster than her spirits. "She
had gone through a lot of depression and sadness," said
Warwick.
"When a marriage breaks up, it's a devastating thing."
Last December Karen returned to L.A. O'Neill was concerned:
"Putting yourself in the same environment where the
problems first developed without totally recovering can cause
setbacks."
But by most accounts Karen was suffused with new energy. She
was planning to record an album this spring. "Karen
was getting along great," insists her longtime
hairdresser, Arthur Johns, who gave her a perm before New
Year's and says she intended to come back to have her hair
streaked bronze. "She had started writing songs
for the first time. She wasn't the type of person to
mop the floor with her tears." Clearly, Karen
Carpenter intended to conquer despair. "I have,"
she told Warwick just two weeks before her death, "a
lot of living left to do."
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