Karen Carpenter Part 2 with Carolyn Kendrick

In this episode, Carolyn and Sarah follow Karen from the height of her fame through her struggle to find independence, her attempts at eating disorder recovery, and finally to her death on February 4, 1983, when she was just 32 years old. Then it's time to sing a song.

We extensively discuss eating disorders, disordered eating, and everything that goes with them in this episode. Please listen with care.

Additional CW: At 01:21:18 we use a term that evokes suicidal imagery. It is okay to pick back up at 01:21:21.

If you want to learn more, try Little Girl Blue by Randy L. Schmidt, our primary source for the information in this episode. 

Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter - Randy L. Schmidt - Google Books

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Where else to find us:

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https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
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http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: Just because we're sober, we don't have to play board games. We don't have to give into that stereotype.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are bringing you part two of the Karen Carpenter story, which I am telling you along with my wonderful producer and co-host for these episodes, Carolyn Kendrick, who you'll hear from in a minute. 

This episode has a gigantic trigger warning attached to it because we are now talking about Karen Carpenter and her eating disorder, and her methods within that eating disorder, and just getting into a lot of the details of it and ultimately her death as a result of it. This might not be the right episode for you. And if you do choose to proceed, maybe take a nice walk if you can while you listen.  

We have a bonus episode coming out in the normal places, Patreon and Apple + subscriptions, with the wonderful Eve Linley, who will be talking about the wave of Anne Hathaway hate that swept America. If you were there, you remember. It's a national issue that I was very happy to get the full story on. So we also have that for you this week. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care listening. Take care generally. Here's the episode.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you what Mark McGrath did on VH1. You're welcome. And with me today is Carolyn Kendrick. Hello! 

Carolyn: Hello, Sarah Marshall. I'm so happy to be back.

Sarah: Something interesting is happening with this show lately, where in the beginning the purpose of You’re Wrong About was, for me anyway, to talk about moral panics and tabloid women. Because those were really my passions and that was what I spent my time thinking about. And the trends that have emerged by accident in the past maybe six months of this show are survival, fashion, and now pop music. And I didn't particularly see it coming, it just happened, is what it feels like to me. 

Carolyn: Yeah. I don't think it's a coincidence, though. We've had a really heavy few years of information to digest with the pandemic and then policing, and it's been a heavy few years and I don't, it doesn't make sense to me that we're in the mood to pivot a little bit in the things that we use as distraction. 

Sarah: Yeah. And so here we go now into Karen Carpenter, part two. If you haven't listened to the first part of this episode, I bet you expect me to scold you and tell you to go back and listen to it, but I don't care. Have dessert first. Do what you want. Just know that in the previous episode we talked about basically our paths individually to the Carpenters and their music growing up, way after they were putting out albums and present in American pop culture and kind of the outside in approach to Karen. 

And now we're going to talk about life for her after the peak of her fame in the mid-seventies. And a lot of talking about her battling with her eating disorder, and ultimately her death in February of 1983. So Carolyn, I would love for you to just bring us up to speed with what happened in the last episode. And not necessarily a point-by-point rundown of what we talked about, but what comes to mind for you as what stands out from that conversation now?

Carolyn: So last time we spoke about Karen and her relationship with her brother Richard. She and her brother were the founding members of Carpenters. Not ‘The Carpenters’, but ‘Carpenters’. She and her family are from Connecticut. Her brother is this very prolific piano player. They move with their parents to Downey, right?

Sarah: Downey, California, 

Carolyn: Which is a suburb of Los Angeles, that from what we understand, is fairly nondescript at this point in time. They start playing music together after she gets a drum set from her parents. But Richard has been practicing his little heinie off for years and years. 

Sarah: It's so true.

Carolyn: So true. And Karen has been maybe a little bit outside of the spotlight within their family. She's younger, she's a woman, and eventually they start performing in different iterations of the band. They get their big hit playing college band shows. What's that called? Bandstand. 

Sarah: Your All-American College Show. It's a very hard title to remember. We said it in the first episode, so you're covered. Just search, ‘Karen Carpenter drumming like a motherfucker’, and it'll come up. 

Carolyn: And then they really get launched into their big iteration of fame in the seventies, mid-seventies, after they've had a not particularly well received first album. And then Herb Alpert of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass gives them a second chance, and then they're skyrocketed into the fame that we know them today. 

And so that's like the text bullet points of what we went through last time. But some of the themes I think that we started to go through are themes of control, themes of responsibility, responsibility for yourself, responsibility for others, obviously sexism in the industry. And are there any other themes that are coming to mind?

Sarah: Self-love is maybe the other one. The idea that self-love is something that we all struggle with and how we look to the stories of artists, and especially suffering artists and we're struggling to understand ourselves and we live in a culture that privileges pretending to be okay over almost any other value, and I think that these struggling stars, and especially these struggling glamorous stars, become such icons for us. Yeah, sometimes for totally awful reasons, right? 

Because Anna Nicole Smith would always make some money for a tabloid, so you can just keep hounding her and hounding her until her death. Their glamor allows us to maybe, or their talent allows us to maybe see ourselves in them and to identify with their struggle in a way that we couldn't otherwise.

Carolyn: Which makes me think of when people transform from being human people to iconography. 

Sarah: Amy Winehouse? 

Carolyn: Yes. Oh my gosh. Perfect example. Yeah. With Karen at the end of our part one, we were learning about different people who were essentially stalking her towards the end, and were really pressing their own agendas into her personal life. When you have no privacy, no boundaries around what the public believes they should have access to you. How do you overcome that? I don't know. 

Sarah: It's important to point out, there's so many things that cultural literacy around has grown so dramatically in the lifespan of a millennial, which contrary to how creaky I feel is really not that long. And in connection to what we talked about in the last episode, stalking was not a crime anywhere in the country until the nineties. This was not a thing that there was literacy around. 

Carolyn: Maybe I knew that because of the DC Sniper episode.

Sarah: It sure does tend to come up on this show. I know we also talked about it in one of the Marcia Clark episodes. Because she had been involved in prosecuting one of the first stalking cases. 

Carolyn: Maybe that's what it was. 

Sarah: But another thing to add to that list is, cultural comprehension of eating disorders. And first the realization that they existed, which took place in the late seventies into the early eighties, through the eighties. And then I think it reached something like literacy in the nineties. Although certainly I think that the way I was educated was lacking in many ways, many big damaging ways. But in the early eighties when Karen is really struggling to survive, people understand that eating disorders exist, but they don't really understand why, in the sense, for Americans and also for her family, why isn't she eating? All she has to do is eat. Why isn't she doing it? 

Carolyn: Yeah. It's such a cognitive dissonance to be told that I'm sure when your whole life, you've been told, oh, you probably don't need to eat that much. You shouldn't eat that, you shouldn't eat that, you shouldn't eat that. And then all of a sudden you get to a point where they're like why aren't you eating? And it's like, wait a second. It seems so obvious to us why that would be the case, but I don't know. I guess if it's just a brand-new thing that you haven't fully processed or thought about then it's like staring into the sun a bit. 

Sarah: Yeah. And, to open this way so it's, there's not a sense of like, where's Sarah coming from in all this the whole time, which I feel would be distracting. I, for a while, since I've come to terms with some stuff, have felt weird about stuff I said in the episode that Mike and I did years ago now about big square quotes, the Obesity Epidemic. Because in that episode he was like, what's your relationship to your weight? And I was like, I'm good. It's great. Cruising… moving on. And I wasn't actually!

Carolyn: This just in.

Sarah: Are you surprised?

Carolyn: Sarah is the lone woman.

Sarah: Ah, I'm the lone woman. Yeah. And I cannot express to you how recently… I can express to you, it was like April, but how much denial I was capable of being in about the fact that I just didn't really eat anything before 5:00 PM basically most days of my life for 15 years. 

Carolyn: Same. 

Sarah: Yeah. I don't know, my thoughts will come out as we go forward. But we are all holding hands together as we enter into this group therapy session. Welcome. Come sit in the circle. Where do we begin? Is there anything that you're feeling curious about?

Carolyn: Yeah, so I want to know about the inner family dynamics between her and Richard, and then also with her and her parents, because as we learned in part one, they have a very strong family unit in a way that I don't totally wrap my brain around. They lived in the same house for many years into Karen's adulthood, and then when she did move out, she was only a few doors down, which I guess is normal for most Americans, but not normal for me. So I just want to know a little bit more about what that's like. 

Sarah: Something that she does that I really identify with is this repeated process of moving out and moving back in and moving in again and moving out again, by degrees. So the first time she and Richard move out is when, I think she's 24 and he's 27. So I'm going to read to you about this chapter in their lives from Little Girl Blue, the Life of Karen Carpenter by Randy El Schmidt, which I have used for a lot of the material in this episode, we're going to go through in a somewhat chronological fashion. And which is a great book that I recommend. And I forget if his name came up in the last episode, but the carpenters are being managed by a guy named Sherwin Bash, which is, can't make this stuff up name wise. 

So Karen and Richard bought a new house for the whole family when they started making money. They still live with their parents, and they are very stressed about broaching the issue of wanting to move out, especially with their mother. The funny thing about Harold Carpenter is that in this book and in a lot of other sources, you just never hear from him. It's unclear based on that, how big of a role he had in, I don't know, family life and decision making. It's hard to tell what his opinion was on a lot of what was going on. But I wish we knew more. 

Carolyn: Huh. Yeah. That's interesting. Harold the father is, maybe present in their lives, but he is not like the controlling, deciding factors on what's going on. So that leaves me to conclude that their mother was really a big factor in a lot of their decision making.

Sarah: Yeah. And gosh, I feel like the phrase like ‘dominant mother figure’ or ‘domineering mother’ is so overused in like sure true crime books about serial killers, where it's like, he had a domineering mother.

Carolyn: So obviously he went and killed people. 

Sarah: And it's become like this kind of boogeyman figure and sort of pop psychology. But parents often are truly more domineering in their children's lives than they have any right to be, and culture has always supported that. And it does seem like Agnes Carpenter really fits that role. I also identify with the thing of just being able to know empirically that your position makes sense, and yet if you're talking to someone, especially who you feel deeply connected to, who raised you, who you feel overwhelmed by in that way, you can know you're in the right and it just doesn't matter if they're confident that their thing is the truth. 

Carolyn: Yeah. I guess America and families are similar in that regard, where the truth seems less and less tethered to an outcome.

Sarah: Yes. Oh my god. Okay, so this is from Little Girl Blue. “Sherwin offered Karen and Rick his advice for officially moving out, but instead of confronting their mother and relocating, the two came up with a way they might evade the issue entirely. They bought their parents a modest 3000 square foot home with four bedrooms and three baths at 8341 Lubec Street in Downey, less than two miles from Newville.” Which is the house they bought for all of them to live in together. “The expectation was that their mother and father would move into this new house’, Bash said. When they explained this to their mother, she absolutely refused to move out of this house. Not only did she refuse to move out, she couldn't understand why they would want to separate and be living in two different houses.” And what do you do? If the argument “I'm 27” doesn't work, then what is left?

Carolyn: Yeah, and I'm curious as to if this plays into Karen's eventual marriage. Because I have some friends who have parents who are maybe along this line of reasoning and often, saying, “I'm 27, I'm an adult, I have the right to make my own decisions”, is not enough for their parent to respect. And if they say, “My husband wants to do this”, that is a way that they can have an out.

Sarah: Not to be too spoiler-y, but yes, I agree. And you know better than most people that my brain is one of those little quarter toy dispenser things with a little plastic ball that you open with a toy or something inside of it. But mine is just like pop culture moments. And I think a lot about the episode of Friends where Rachel’s mom, played by that girl, Marlo Thomas, announces that she's leaving Rachel's dad inspired by Rachel's newfound independence, because Rachel disrupted the sort of family marital tradition. And at a certain point she's, “Honey, I went straight from my parents' house to the sorority house to your father's house. You didn't marry your Barry. I married mine.” And I would've seen that when I was like 12, and that's so spelled out for me, the reality of women historically. 

The traditional path has been to just go from one umbrella to another. And so the plan backfires but Karen and Richard do move out. They move in together to the house that they bought for their parents to move into. So what a fiasco. I love that the parents, on the one hand I do get being like, no, we've been living here, we don't want to move. But it's just whatever. Just take the new house. Yes. And I think it's just the basic value system of a parent, you own your child, forever and Khalil Gibran and many other Instagram accounts I follow know that if you bring a person into the world, you are, from that moment, two separate entities. You're always growing apart and helping them to grow up and be independent of you. And I realize that's a terrifying thing to say, historically. Because the idea of understanding that what somebody is doing with their life is fundamentally not about you, it's about them. It's not just that people don't realize that, it's that they're actively and aggressively discouraged from ever thinking about it. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Absolutely. That makes me think of some mothers that I know I've heard describe the experience of having a baby as once you give birth, it feels like you have an organ outside of your body, which I can totally empathize with, but then, that's not you. You're technically, you're connected, but you're not the same thing. 

Sarah: Yeah. On the one hand, everything in your being is attuned toward keeping this person alive and you are so deeply connected. And yet also it's I guess the ultimate expression of that love and that connection and that selfless love that parents are always talking about is that you let them go, you let them get outta Downey.

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. Or you just are even able to see them as separate from yourselves. One thing that comes up a lot for me is parents only being able to see their own experiences through you. They are only able to be like, oh, I'm scared of this, so therefore you must be, I'm scared of, et cetera. Or I want this goal so therefore you must have this goal. Which I'm sure comes up with their career. 

Sarah: People have the power that you give them, and that's not to say that it's easy to take it away. It's extremely fucking hard to stop giving it to them. That's the real torture of it all. So they move to a new place on their own together for the first time. It's a couple miles away from the other house that they have bought for their parents. So they're living together. People over the years assume that they're married based on them being two adults who are living so much of their lives together. 

And people, as they would, now come up with conspiracy theories about how really they're singing all these love songs to each other. I think it’s gross and comes from being obsessed with taboo, but also it is weird to make a career singing love songs as siblings. There's something about, it's not that they're weird, it's that kind of the broader culture is weird to feel so terrified of sex in a way that manifests and that sort of being what the public responds to so intensely, maybe.

Carolyn: Yeah. And it feels like an impossible obstacle for them to navigate because, what are they going to do? Sing songs about being siblings? That's not that's not exactly what people want.

Sarah: Nobody needs that. It's funny to me that every song is a love song. We don't really talk about that, and of course there's exceptions like the, One Eyed, One Horned, Flying Purple People Eater, for example, although some might argue that it is in some way. But seriously it's like it's so everywhere that we don't notice how many songs are not about love or at least lust. 

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. Or there are a lot of songs about work that I can think of or disasters or friendship. But overall yes, most songs, most pop songs are love songs because that is one of the most concentrated emotions that we feel in our daily lives. I could see how people could feel a little uncanny valley or like the scene in Arrested Development with the afternoon delight situation. Where you're like, okay, they don't realize what they're singing. Maybe this is a little weird that if not sexual innuendo, then romantic content within this, these songs. But yeah. Truly what else are you going to sing about? 

Sarah: Yeah. And that's what they're great at and whatever. Again, it feels like that's missing the point, but then there is weirdness in their relationship, maybe people are picking up on that, or maybe they're just making up an entirely different thing. But one of the issues that comes up when they're now living together is that Richard gets a girlfriend who basically moves herself in and Karen's like, no, we're not living with your girlfriend. She has to move her stuff out. Unacceptable. 

And he has another girlfriend who is their hairdresser who goes with them on tour, who works for the band and who, Karen also at her mother's urging, kind of as a tool of her mom, basically forces out of the relationship and is like, you can either work for us or you can keep dating Richard, but you can't do both. And she's like, fine. I'm doing neither.

Carolyn: Huh. Interesting. 

Sarah: It feels like there's just this family dynamic where it is considered totally normal for everyone to be controlling about each other. 

Carolyn: Huh. But the solution for this is so simple, especially if you have the means that they do at this time. If you don't like living with your brother's girlfriend, get your own fucking house. That seems like a much more logical answer to me than forcing your brother to not live with his girlfriend. 

Sarah: And then I feel like it is the thing of if Richard has a girlfriend and we all live together, then we're not just living together, the two of us as a unit and I can imagine it feeling like that intimacy is disrupted and we were talking just recently about how sibling dynamics, you don't have to be romantically jealous of your sibling having a dating somebody. You can just be like, Hey, he's mine. There are just families that are obsessed with being a family. I definitely am not from one, but I've always noticed that. 

Carolyn: Totally. I once broke up with somebody because their family gave me the ick when they were like, I feel bad because they're such sweet people. But they were really into board games and it's not that I don't like board games, but it's just that that was their way of expressing that they were like a family's family.

Sarah: That's totally what it is. It's like being a jazz musician’s, jazz musician. 

Carolyn: Yes, totally. But I've never told this person this. But yeah, that was what made me break up with them. 

Sarah: Which is nice because it's not about you, it's just board game culture was too much. Karen is dating around a bit. She's really struggling with it. And she says often in interviews, it's really hard to find someone to date when you're surrounded by a giant entourage and you're in a different city every night. And one of the things she repeats a lot, which just feels like something that we should be able to be past culturally, but I really don't think we are and don't think we were, is that she needs a man who's independently wealthy because she doesn't want somebody to leech off of her financially or to be attracted to her because of her money. 

Because both she and Rich are millionaires at this point. Obviously, they can buy an entire house to avoid having a difficult conversation. She wants a man who's like able to be, secure enough to be with her, basically. And she interprets that as needing somebody who's I don't know what the various incel communities are, I don't really think it's a community, but whatever. It's as the self-defined incel community, we call high value. 

Carolyn: I could see it being really hard to find somebody to connect with when you're not seeing people all that often. And then also if you have a pretty set in stone idea of what would be a good match for you, because I don't think you would need any of that. But I could see culturally within the time, it's the seventies where we’re barely out of second wave feminism. 

Sarah: Yeah, we're in the portion of time where second wave feminism is taking a nap. 

Carolyn: In my experience, there aren't that many great businessmen and there aren't that many great, rich people that I feel like would be able to connect like with a performer.

Sarah: This is the controversial take of the year for us, yeah. 

Carolyn: Yeah. And it's I'm not saying that there aren't people of means that have empathy and the ability to extend humanity. But if you're an artist and you come from a particular background that is maybe not super-duper rich and then all of a sudden, you're super rich, you have different values than people who are like, I'm going to go work on Wall Street and I'm going to make money and that's how I will secure my future. It seems unlikely that she's going to be able to find somebody, not that I know a ton of her values right now, but with artistic values that also would be able to provide for her financially. Not provide for her but provide for themselves. 

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. I guess to not be dependent on her or for her to not feel, and then as someone who clearly struggles within insecurity, to always wonder, does he love me for me or does he love me for my money? Or does he want, whatever, all the goodies that come with it. And this is something I'm realizing inside this conversation, which is why I love doing the show, because I realize stuff. 

But if a man or anyone, is not secure with you being successful, are you making more money than him or being what he deems to be scarily talented or whatever, there's no amount of money or fame or success that will make that okay for him. He feels that way because he feels that way. They feel that way because they feel that way. It's not just men that do this, but it's a theme though. 

Carolyn: They do have a longer track record. Dump his ass.

Sarah: Yeah. And the cultural expectation of men getting brainwashed to believe that they have to be something no human can be. And that's not fair to them. And they have to figure out how to get deprogrammed and that's harder to do if the world is telling you that, like that's the correct way for you to be.

Carolyn: Yeah. It's harder to deprogram if you don't have any screwdrivers.

Sarah: If you can't open the mainframe! So in early 1975, Karen met Terry Ellis, who founded Chrysalis the record label in 1969. Which I always associate with Blondie because I remember I had Blondie CDs when I was 13 and I'm almost positive that they were put out by Chrysalis. I used to look at all the logos. 

Carolyn: Oh, that's cool.

Sarah: But this is exciting, right? Because he's a music industry guy. He's in her world, he has his own kind of realm of power within it. And based on this book, this is the most promising relationship. that she's been in as far as we know romantically. He's interviewed for a Little Girl Blue, and one of the things he says is, “she was very loving and tactile, and she loved to be hugged”. Which, I don't know, I guess makes me emotional. 

One of the things Terry does that I love is that he sees Karen perform, he hasn't seen her give a concert or a live show or anything before, and he says, “I watched them perform and my mouth dropped because she was a terrible performer. She hadn’t the slightest idea about how to use a stage. She did everything wrong. She wasn't using her vivacious personality or her wonderful smile. She wasn't using the fact that the audiences absolutely worshiped her. She'd sing a song and when the guitar player or drummer played a little solo, she'd turned her back on the audience and sort of click her fingers and had no interrelation with the audience. 

Anybody who goes near stage when they're six years old learns that you never ever turn your back on an audience. I just simply couldn't believe that they had top class management, and nobody had taken her by the hand and said, Karen, let's work on your stage show.” 

Carolyn: Yeah, nobody turns their back unless you're Miles Davis.

Sarah: Wait, when did he do that? 

Carolyn: So Miles Davis, he did that at the end of his career, like in the eighties, multiple times, and I think it was considered an affront because they thought it was personal. They're like, you never turn your back on the audience. Maybe. I don't know, from what I hear, like it was just because he wanted to be able to cue the other band members better.

Sarah: Yeah. And something I've experienced a tiny little bit, I'm indicating like a size of saffron sized amount, and that you've experienced like a giant-sized amount is the relationship between the performer and the audience. And so this is all happening in 1975 when the Carpenters are riding the peak of their fame. They've ascended fame mountain, it's all happening. And they're also, as a result of their fame arguably, maintaining a schedule of both recording and touring that is completely unsustainable and makes them, to some extent, victims of their own success. 

They apparently are informed that they won't make a profit on touring unless they do over 150 shows a year. And the idea of trying to maintain any kind of personal life or personal growth while just focusing that much energy on touring and performing, yeah, of course you didn't have time to grow emotionally. You were busy. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Which relates to what we were speaking to last time about the idea of being a prodigy. When you're a prodigy, all of your energy goes into learning the specific skill, but then you don't develop these other arenas of your life that allow you to actually synthesize human experience into making art, and then also deplete the other personal arenas of your life, obviously.

Sarah: Yeah, and this is also, especially gratifying because as we're recording this, you and I just spent a couple days at the US figure skating championships watching the junior competition. 

Carolyn: Yes. Highlight of my life, I would say. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Highlight of my life. I feel like if I went back to tiny Sarah and was like, someday you'll be in the front row for a figure skating national event with your two friends. I would say I'm, wow, I'm going to have two friends. Skating itself is such a weird world and then seeing younger skaters within that, I would love to hear just your thoughts on it. Because I think it really connects with all of this and you're also coming to this pretty fresh, which I feel like always brings up big realizations.

Carolyn: Totally. The only experience I have within the figure skating world is Tonya Harding episodes and your article. So my relationship to figure skating is very brand new.

Sarah: But you know that it is unfair, which is very key. 

Carolyn: Yes, I do know that it's unfair. And I do know that all of these kids spend, and some of them are adults, but all of these people are spending enormous amounts of time practicing and putting energy into their craft, which is what Karen and Richard are doing, and what Richard is being recognized for, because he's considered prodigious early on, and it's shocking to see the dissonance between the amount of energy and time and sweat and blood and hard work, just all of that, and then to see what the result is, at least for figure skating, you put everything into this and then you're nationals and then you're working within this framework where it seems like the USFSA is not reaching the American public in the way that you would think it would. There were not that many people there, and there certainly weren't that many spectators like we were probably the only people who were not directly related to the competitors. 

Sarah: I would guess that there were as many, and this is a very high guess, possibly as many as 40 other people who weren't support staff or volunteers or related to the skaters, or part of coaching, whatever, but no, it was not a spectator event. And I must have remarked on this 58 times while we were together, over and over, I said one of two things. I said either, I can't believe we're here. This is amazing. I can't believe we're seeing this in person. People are landing triple jumps like this Incredible, this unbelievable feat of human inventiveness and athleticism 10 yards away from where we're sitting eating popcorn. And also like, where is everyone? 

Carolyn: Yeah. Where is everyone? I suppose how that connects to the carpenters is that, Richard and Karen, they're pinning all of their energy. They're spending, if not 150, at least 200 dates on the road every year, your personal relationships are not able to grow. You still live with your parents on and off. You're putting everything into this, and then it's true. You get to the mountain, and the mountain is that you get to express and play your music. But reaching success is not necessarily connected to feeling fulfilled within your art.

Sarah: Yeah. Which is such a dirty secret. I think we don't want to believe it. We can see it in all these places, but we keep pushing it under the rug. And I thought that I had, while we were watching this competition and I was just thinking, because the article I published on Tanya Harding that it was my national’s debut as a writer, honestly. It came out in January 2014, and that was at the tail end of a three, four-year period of me being a huge figure skating fan and following current competitors and following the sport and doing so with a fair amount of difficulty because it's hard to watch. 

And when I was growing up in the nineties, figure skating was just on all the time. I want to say there was less stuff to be on, but network TV doesn't have anything to put on as it is. If you turn on primetime, it's what? It's a singing contest between fifth graders or something. It's not like it's been replaced by something more impressive. They can't air Succession on NBC. So just coming back into that after several years away, it just reawakened a lot of the things that I had been thinking about when I was following it so closely. And one of the things that I think I was trying to work out through my fixation with it when I was younger, it didn't quite get to greatness doesn't make you happy. 

Carolyn: No it doesn't. 

Sarah: And we really want to think that. We're like, wouldn't it be great to be great? And just looking at people who have been inarguably great, some of them lead happy and fulfilled lives and a lot of them don't. And I don't think the ratio is any different than it is for any of the rest of us mooks. Especially when you factor the difficulties that exposure to, I'm just thinking about, full disclosure, I'm thinking about Nick and Aaron Carter. Once you correct for the additional pain that money and hangers on and power and people trying to use you to get more of it creates, then you can imagine that like to have something that great insight of you means that sort of you experience the power of it or that it gives you power as a person, but you might just feel like a container for that power. And that feels very true for Karen Carpenter. 

Carolyn: And one of the things that really struck me with going and seeing the figure skating competition is that, it's this art form, so obviously they're competing and they're doing athletic things, but it is so connected to dance and it's so connected to the body and movement and all of these things that we think of as ways that we as humans connect to the ethereal, connect to God, connect to humanity, all of these bigger, broader things. And then even, competition and pushing yourself to the limit of your ability, there's something artistic in that endeavor, but then it's being condensed into this competition where it's like, okay, when art becomes only competition, it's compressed in this weird way. 

In the same way that when I think of Karen and Richard, and then anybody or Aaron Carter, like anybody who has this desire to be creating art, to be connecting with people, to be connecting with audiences, you have this thing that is larger than life. It's larger than yourself. It's larger than any human. It's larger than the history of humanity. It's larger than all of us. And then it gets squished and compressed into this modern version of the music industry, which in and of itself is a competition. You have to mold yourself into this particular way of interfacing that is maybe not totally combative but is always going to be rubbing with your original intention.

Sarah: Yeah. And the fact of competition being everywhere feels like it's such an accepted sort of part of life that we often don't even see it. And one of the things that just consistently feels very strange is our desire as humans to both make art and then decide what is the best art? We love having art contests.

Carolyn: It sounds so weird. 

Sarah: It's really funny. Like when you think about it, the majority of successful network TV programming, I guess it actually is like figure skating because it's art contests. We love singing contests. There are hundreds of kinds of singing contests on tv.

Carolyn: That's a great point. That's one of the great tragedies of living within the system, is that you just often just don't have the time or the space or the energy or whatever to do things that you aren't great at. It's this reason why people get so burnt out on oh, I had a hobby and then I monetized my hobby, and then now I'm like tired of my hobby. 

Sarah: Not me. I would never.

Carolyn: Yeah, not us. We don't know what that's, but I don't know. That's one of the reasons that I like, love my particular music community, which is very focused in the bluegrass and old time and older country world because it's very much based on, especially during festival season, during the summers, you go to a festival, you camp with your friends, you sit knee to knee and you play fiddle tunes into the middle of the night and it's not about who's the best, it's about how long you can play your fiddle tune.

Sarah: And then the last fiddler to stop playing becomes the May Queen. It's so American to not realize or to have a whole culture based on hiding the fact that it's more fun to share something with people. I think almost all of the time, it feels better to share something with people than to be the best at something, to win a contest. 

Carolyn: Oh God, yes. I one hundred percent agree. And I know we've diverted from like the Karen story a little bit 

Sarah: It's an Olympic sized swimming pool and we're somewhere in it. 

Carolyn: But yeah, that's why I think podcasts are thriving right now because there's communities built into podcasts. There are people that you're able to connect with because you've listened to this thing, it's like the modern version of a book club. Not that book clubs don't also exist, but. 

Sarah: And it's a book club where you don't have to read the book with your very own eyeballs, which is always the hardest part.

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. You have to use your ear balls instead of your eyeballs. But anyway, I'm curious about how this all relates to Karen being on the road having this new relationship. 

Sarah: And one of the things I was wondering about specifically, so Karen's 25 at this point.

Carol: Oh my gosh, so young. 

Sarah: I know, and I think of you as a very experienced touring musician and it's funny how fast you get old when you're doing something that demands everything from you and I'm wondering about your thoughts on that and about what maybe, we're looking at her now from her like mid-twenties, which is when peak fame really sets in, to her death, which happens when she's 32. Which is young, but I think is old for someone trying to keep up a grueling schedule, especially while also having a progressively more severe eating disorder. 

Carolyn: I'm really caught on the fact that you said that they needed to play more than 150 dates a year to make money. Because you would think okay, these are some of the most famous people in the world. I can imagine they're playing massive stadiums. Why is it that the system is set up so they… I don't get it. Because then that means that they have, and I'm sure they're doing more than 150, it's pretty common for acts of that stature to be doing like 200 dates a year. That leaves roughly 150 days off the road, which most of that will be taken up with appearances and doing interviews and recording writing new music, which we haven't even gotten into the fact that if they are writing original music or not. 

Sarah: But even when they're not working with original music they've written, it's still like arranging it, remaking, expanding a bank commercial into a fully orchestrated pop song. And also I assume that a lot of those 150 days do not come in a row. 

Carolyn: No. Absolutely not. Picture it like, okay, yeah, you're going to go on a two-week tour. You have maybe one or two days off within that 14-day window. You spend so much of your time traveling just to get to the gig. And then once you're actually at the gig, you play it and then you immediately are like on the road to the next thing. It's not like you're getting to experience the cities that you're in. It's not like you're getting to get to know the people, the community, the culture. Your whole life is totally revolved around this road band that you have and like the roadies and like all of the people that are involved in that. And it's tough. It's really tough.

Sarah: Yeah. And I mean it, and it seems like there is such an intense camaraderie, not to say that it's always super positive and friendly. But saying, it does seem like being an Olympian because nobody else knows what that's like.

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. 

Sarah: So back to Karen's new boyfriend, being like, Karen, this is terrible. What he recollects saying is, “Karen, I'm sorry to say this, but you were terrible. Now that's the bad news. But the good news is that you're never going to be that terrible again”.

Carolyn: Oh my God. 

Sarah: He says, “Tomorrow I'm taking you onto the stage and I'm going to teach you some fundamentals.” Yeah, you respond either probably very positively or negatively to your person you're dating, saying they're going to teach you fundamentals and I would not roll with it. But I do think that this is very, this is constructive and it's really about her kind of recognizing who she is to people. 

And so they go out on stage and Terry says, you shouldn't stand with your back to the audience during one of your musicians’ solos, you should walk toward the audience and interact with them. And in his recollection, he says, what do you mean? He says, go to the front of the stage and reach your hand down. Why should I do that? The audience will like it. He says they'll jump up and they'll hold your hand. And she says, no they won't. Yes, Karen, they will. Then they will absolutely love it. 

And then he says, and you're not paying attention to the audience members and the balconies. And he says, watch the edge of the stage. Look up to the people in the balconies and wave at them. And she says, oh, I can't do that. Yes, you can, Karen. They'll love it. And what will they do? They'll wave back, Karen? And she says, no, they won't. And then of course she does it and yeah, the audience does do those things.

Carolyn: Has she been to a concert before?  

Sarah: Yeah. She's spending a lot of time with live music. At least, I don't know if she was like a hobbyist going around seeing other acts perform, but at least in all these competitions that she and Richard were winning as they were ascending, you would have to see other people play.

Carolyn: It's a very different experience performing behind an instrument versus just being a singer. And being a singer is much more vulnerable in the body department because you don't necessarily have anything to do with your hands. It's a lot like being a model in the sense that you have to perform with your body and express in that regard. And when you're drumming, you're drumming so that your body is covered. 

Last time we learned that through the late seventies she was being presented more as a front woman and playing drums less and less. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that she maybe didn't totally know what to do with her body, yeah. It's the same thing when you take a photo and somebody's like, let me take a picture of you. And you're like, oh God, what do I do with my hands? 

Sarah: You're like, yeah, what do they do normally? I have no clue. Totally. She came out gradually from behind her drums and she always did it very reluctantly. It seems like she was just very reluctant to become a front woman. And one of the things that also turns out to be contributing to this is that she's very self-conscious about her hips. This is the area that she really fixates on when she sees images of herself and as she's dieting, more and more severely. I feel like almost everybody has certain body parts that for whatever reason, have this magical property for us. One of the reasons she likes being behind the drums is that people can't see her hips. 

Carolyn: Totally. Makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Everybody has that body part that if I told you what mine was, you'd be like, what? You would've never thought about it, probably. I'm sure nobody was thinking about it, I'm sure, maybe some people were commenting about her hips. 

Sarah: For sure. But people who don't have it out for other people's bodies generally I'm sure would never think of them. And one of Karen's very best friends in adulthood, Frenda Leffler recalls that when she and Karen first met, she felt like Karen was very unpleasant to her. And then later on when they became friends, Karen was like, I'm sorry, I was like that. I was just so insecure. And Frenda was like, why?

Carolyn: It's hard to imagine that other people have things to be insecure about when we see them as angels in our eyes.

Sarah: But she does figure out how to interact with the crowd and that the crowd really loves her, really wants to be close to her. So 1975 is really when the public starts noticing that Karen is looking very thin. And there are rumors that management has to address. 

There's a rumor that Karen has cancer, and no one's being told. That's where people's minds go because basically she started dieting in college and was within the healthy weight range, and then dieted down, especially for the time, to the Twiggy adjacent beauty standard, which is not thinness, but skinniness. She dieted down to be a skinny person. And that was where everyone was like, you look great. This is perfect. And she was like I want to lose another five pounds. 

Ultimately, she got down to slightly half of her original weight when she started with dieting, when she was a teenager. So if you look at pictures of her late in life, like at a certain point she suddenly begins to look 20 years older than she is. 

Carolyn: And just to be clear, we're not saying weight specific numbers because cuz we don't need to. That's not going to help anyone.

Sarah: My understanding is that's triggering for people. The information is very available. If you're interested, you can go find it. But to me, the real truth of the matter is that she loses half of herself and sees it as an achievement, which is what she's encouraged to do. When she goes out to eat with people, she'll make a big show of really enjoying what she's eating and then because she's enjoying it so much, she has to offer it to everybody and just offload it off of her plate and moves her food around a ton, it just becomes increasingly difficult to just To eat anything in any significant portion. She's very into lemon water. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Oh man. In the moments of my inability to eat in a structured fashion, if I miss a meal just cause I'm busy or whatever, if I miss a meal, I get hungry, but then at a certain point then I get nauseous. Yeah. And the idea of eating food makes me more nauseous, and nothing sounds good, the hungrier I get. Yeah, totally. Or sometimes I'm like literally the only thing that sounds good to me right now is instant grits. 

Sarah: Yeah. I realized that last year. I was like, you know when I can't face eating anything else, I can eat instant grits, no matter what, when your stomach is like half turned into a black hole, it'll still accept instant grits enthusiastically. Pro tip. 

Carolyn:  Yeah. Pro tip, if you're feeling that. But I can see that, getting into a cycle easily. 

Sarah: Yeah. Oh yeah. Completely. And that you've gotten so much positive reinforcement for it, for years, like people have been and people don't know how to talk to her too, because, again, it's the seventies, and her family's response, this is a response that comes in, I think in, for the most part, totally out of love is like, Karen eats something. You don't know what you don't know. 

Culture has to catch up with what we need to know about people we love and how to help them, but also something that serves us even when we don't have the information is to be able to hear the person that we're trying to help.

Carolyn: You don’t always have to have the answers, but you can always have an open ear in an open arm for if somebody needs support. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Carolyn: And yeah, I'm sure there's many things that people are going through right now that we don't have language for yet that there's no possible way for you to know how to fix their problem. The only thing you can do is just be there for people. And there's like a trend going around on TikTok right now about almond moms. Are you familiar with this? 

Sarah: No, this is the first time in my whole life I'm hearing the phrase almond moms and I'm so happy it's from you. 

Carolyn: So basically the trend of almond moms is, young people will show their mom or maybe not always show their mom, but they'll give a tour of an almond mom's fridge, and then it's a single stick of…

Sarah: Oh, I see. 

Carolyn: String cheese and then one apple. And there's like nothing in the fridge. The idea is oh, I have an almond bomb. If you say oh, I'm hungry. She'll be like, oh, have a few almonds. 

Sarah: Totally, yeah. A few almonds, you either hear that as just a meaningless phrase or you're like, oh my god. Yeah, because Lindy West writes about this, how the phrase, ‘A handful of almonds’, just kind of defines diet culture of the past. I don't know, like 1995 to 2015, I would argue.

Carolyn: Absolutely. But a lot of these young people that are talking about their almond moms, they're of the age that they would've been coming into consciousness around the Karen Carpenter era. Just all of this stuff, we haven't dealt with any of it, so it's nice to think that we have a better understanding of eating disorders now, but most of the public has not dealt with these big themes. So we're still dealing with the repercussions of this rhetoric.

Sarah: It's shocking, looking at how we don't recognize culturally the pattern of dieting, destroying people's lives so reliably if it doesn't get you down to a weight where you're visibly incredibly ill because. Many have argued that Maria Callas’ voice was destroyed by her dieting so intensely, and Zero Mostel died while he was on this intense and very dangerous crash diet. 

And people who we just think of as separate from that conversation, but there's a real path of carnage, which again, if you listen to Maintenance Phase, you know all about that. Karen checks into Cedar Sinai for exhaustion because she's finding herself physically unable to just to keep up with her touring schedule. It's at the point where if she's not performing, she will be lying down flat on her back to conserve energy, I assume, and then the second she has to perform, she’ll get up and go out and do it. 

So it's like she can do it, but then she just can't once she's done, she's incapacitated. And Richard's going through something similar because he was prescribed Quaaludes to help him sleep and wasn't told that they had addictive properties.

Carolyn: Of course not. 

Sarah: Which was a big thing in the seventies. We were like, we have all these new pharmaceuticals, just have fun. I'm picturing Jennifer Coolidge in the purse party episode of Sex and the City. Have fun! 

Carolyn: Oh my gosh, yes. 

Sarah: And then like years later we were like, oh, these are actually really addictive. Sorry, we should have mentioned, sorry. He can barely perform and that's when he I think realizes, oh fuck, this is truly serious. I can't perform anymore. And so he checks himself into rehab. 

Carolyn: I'm glad that he is seeking help.

Sarah: Later on he thinks that Karen should check herself into some kind of, inpatient rehab for her eating disorder. But that kind of thing is really in its infancy. Yeah. And also you have to say, you have to be able to say to yourself that you have that scale of a problem.

Carolyn: Certainly. 

Sarah: So Karen moves in with Terry briefly and then for whatever reason just is no, I don't want to do this anymore. Terry, his read, says that Karen's mother sees him as a threat to the whole situation. Agnes Carpenter is vocal as time goes by about the fact that Karen and Richard need to keep performing as a unit, which gets back to the kind of dominant feeling within the family and for people observing them that Richard is who this is all about. Karen is there, because he's the genius and he needs her in order to fully thrive and get his music into the world. And that she's important, but she's important in so many ways because she helps him to do what he needs to do. 

And no one in her family, or at least her mother and brother, really don't seem to want her to pursue a solo career. And I think they also, or at least Agnes, according to Terry, seems to see him as someone who's going to interfere with that, basically because he also has his own label. He can establish Karen as a solo act. He can take her to England, he can split up the whole thing. So it feels very, I'm sure all of us have been in some kind of relationship dynamic that makes us feel familiar. Or maybe not. Maybe some of you have had really healthy lives. That's good. I'm happy. 

Carolyn: I'm happy for you, truly. Coming back to the idea that it was codependence all along, this is such codependent behavior. Within codependent family structures, there's often like one person that is the central figure of codependency and then everybody else has to mold their lives and their behaviors and their language around whatever this person is needing. 

And it seems like this is Agnes, in this particular situation, where Agnes has this idea of what is right and what is like the right thing to be doing, and we need to be together as a unit. And I just can't imagine what would've happened in her life that led her to think that you're holding your family so tight in your hands that you're crushing them.

Sarah: And yet, so many people do it. And I feel like Everything Everywhere, All at Once was so successful partly because so many people have experience with that kind of relationship and yet it doesn't get depicted that much. And certainly not with any depth very often. Someone has decided your identity for you and won't brook any opposition to it. That feels like such a big part of her life. 

And I think aside from family interfering, and aside from it being annoying for your boyfriend to teach you fundamentals, even if you need it, I feel like there's, in my experience, an existential terror to coming up into the orbit of a giant growth experience. Once that ride starts, we can't really get off, so she doesn't get on the ride. She waits for Terry to be outta town and then she packs up her stuff and leaves while he's away and avoids making a scene. 

Carolyn: Oh, Karen. And it's just because her mom thinks Terry's a threat. There's no tension in the relationship interpersonally. It's just career stuff. 

Sarah: I'm sure there's tension because there's always some of some kind, pretty much. But yeah, I mean I think her mom feels the kids need to remain the kids, they need to stay in this land before time where they don't grow up and they don't get married, and they don't make their own solo efforts and where they just keep doing exactly what they're doing. And then we can see both Karen and Richard as the mid-seventies become the late seventies. This is just the grueling of the schedule taking its toll. And I think also continuing to do something to do the same thing and to artificially avoid growth for so long. I think that takes its toll as well. 

Carolyn: Oh man, I am heartbroken on behalf of Karen that she didn't have the resources or availability to be able to detach from that. That makes me really sad. It takes a lot of energy and courage and backup, emotional backup from friends and family and community to be able to make big changes in your life, whether it's leaving a relationship or changing careers or any of these big things that we need to make decisions upon. And you need community around you to make those decisions. But if your whole family is structured, your family is your family, and you don't have anybody else around. She's got her friend, Frenda. She's got Frenda.

Sarah: She's got Frenda!

Carolyn: Maybe she has other friends that are like helping her along with this too, that I don't know about. But even if you have friends, it just seems like this family situation is set up in a way for her to not be able to expand her availability of choices in life.

Sarah: Yeah, totally. It feels good to see her also get a win for once because after she breaks up with Terry, she moves back in with her parents again. But fairly soon after that she buys a condo in Century Towers, which is in the Century city, which is where Nakatomi Tower is. So that's really great. 

Carolyn: Oh, that's great. Yeah, go condos! That’s great.

Sarah: And she has a doorbell made where when you ring the bell, it plays the first six notes of, We've Only Just Begun, which I think is really nice. I just like this little anecdote. So she hires a decorator named John Catrell, and he says, “What do you like?” And she says, “I want it to look classy in a funky kind of way. I want it to be top-notch, top class, yet I want people to feel like they can put their feet up on anything. I don't want it to look stuffy, yet I want it to be beautiful.” 

Karen's friend Carol recalled that, “Karen's bedroom closet was a fine example of her friend's quest for perfectionism. ‘Karen was very, very meticulous’, she says. ‘The clothes hangers were all the same in a quarter inch apart. The pants were all together, the blouses all together. It was like an amazing boutique with everything arranged in order.’”

Carolyn: It makes a lot of sense to me that if you've been in a situation your whole life where you're fundamentally out of control, you move across the country because you've your brother. You're thrust into this career where you know your family has a ton of control and deciding power over what you're doing, and then you know, you're thrust into the music industry that is deciding how much you're touring and how intensely and all this stuff, you're out of control in so many different ways. It makes sense to me that she is finally putting her energy into being able to control her home and what her home feels like. And then also makes sense that she is controlling her food intake in that way because when you are totally out of control of your life, what are the things that you have power over? What goes into your body and what your house looks like?

Sarah: There's something very exciting about taking the act of homemaking and having the theme be like what do I want? And she's also become friends with Olivia Newton John at this point, and Olivia, and they had nicknames for each other, and Karen called her ‘Ong’.

Carolyn: Oh, that's nice. 

Sarah: And Olivia says, “The whole world was a nickname. It was like she actually had her own language. She'd say, did you talk to the rents? Those were my parents. If you didn't know what she was thinking about, you'd think she was from another country. She'd be fantastic at text messaging.” Oh, I love that she said that. 

Carolyn: That's really cute to think about. I like that. 

Sarah: I love thinking of, wouldn't it be great if Karen Carpenter was like alive and well, and on Instagram, or like on TikTok? She would so be on TikTok. 

Carolyn: She would totally be on TikTok. Yeah. 

Sarah: She would find teenagers who were like dancing to Carpenter songs and she would complement them and leave little, like heart emojis. That's what I think. 

Carolyn: I bet that she would do what people who were like learning her own drum solos and then watch her. It would be her responding to other people learning her drum solos.

Sarah: Yeah, that's what I believe. I believe it. So in June 1976, they released their first album that wasn't an immediate smash hit. People feel like they've had enough carpenters. It could have nothing to do with the quality, but maybe the presence and the emotiveness that they've been able to muster for all these years, maybe that gets harder.

Carolyn: Yeah, I could see that. I could also see there being like a cultural shift away from the kind of smoothness that they're after. 

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. And also, it's 1976, disco is taking over the nation, but there is a song on this album called, I Need to Be In Love, which Karen says that she finds very true for herself. The first verse of that says, “The hardest thing I've ever done is keep believing there's someone in this crazy world for me. The way that people come and go through temporary lives, my chance could come, and I might never know.” And she says, her reaction was, oh my God, it's so true. At a certain point says in an interview she really wants to be in love but hasn't felt it yet. And I have a strong response to that. 

Carolyn: It makes a lot of sense that she's connecting with this song and a sense of okay, like so much of my life has been, I've just been on this roller coaster of a ride and I'm hanging on the best I can. But she's at this point where she's thinking what do I want? What could that look like? How could that come to me? How is that even possible? And not to pivot too much, but I'm curious, the Carpenters are not writing their songs. Is that true?

Sarah: So they're doing a lot of rearrangement of covers. They're also working with a musician and songwriter named John Bettis. So Richard Carpenter co-writes four of their top 10 hits with Betis, which are Top of the World, Goodbye to love, Yesterday Once More, and Only Yesterday. 

Carolyn: Gotcha. The seventies are also a period of time where the idea of the singer songwriter is new. That kind of comes to play in the sixties, really and some, a little bit in the fifties. But it used to be that there were songwriters who were working on Tim Penn Alley, and then performers would come and then pick the song, or the label would pick the song for the performer to perform. 

But Carol King was one of those songwriters who then merged the performing and the songwriting act. And so that's what became the singer songwriter. I don't know, maybe just think about that the next time that you listen to pop music, because when you are listening to a song that somebody wrote, you get the benefit of hearing their innermost thoughts. And when you listen to a song that somebody is performing, that means that you're listening to a song that they have chosen that they want you to hear them perform, which is a different turn of the dice. 

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. And I feel like there's an impulse in people who like to disparage pop music that it's like a lesser art form to sing a song someone else wrote for you or a just song someone else wrote. And I think it's just different. It doesn't have to be less good.

Carolyn: Yeah, I agree. 

Sarah: So Karen has another boyfriend, a guy whose nickname is Softly. He works for A&M, and one of the higher ups at A&M basically calls in Softly and is like, you got to stop dating Karen. And basically both of them are tricked into thinking that the other person lost interest when in fact it's like they're being taken apart by management like it's a Victorian novel. 

Carolyn: What the heck? 

Sarah: Here's an anecdote for you, again, I'm reading from Little Girl Blue, “With no serious romantic interests in sight, Karen enjoyed a few sporadic dates with musician friend Tom Baller and several entertainers including Barry Manilow, actor Mark Harmon, and comedian Steve Martin.

Carolyn: Wow. Nice.

Sarah: “Steve really liked Karen, and of course she thought he was an absolute scream, says Evelyn Wallace.” Who knew her well in these years. “They were going out and Karen had picked out what she was going to wear. Then word got around to Rickard that Karen was going to go out that night with the Steve Martin. It wasn't long before he got in touch with Karen and said, oh, I just got to the studio, so we're going to be recording tonight. Knowing that Karen had a date, he somehow all of a sudden got the studio and they were going to go up and record. See, even when she was on her own and living in the condo, Richard had a string on her. She was never ever her own boss. 

Carolyn: Ah, what the fuck, Richard. Come on.

Sarah: One of the things that could be going on there that seems likely is like the fear of Karen aligning herself with power outside of the family and being able to assert herself that way. And I think that you don't have to know that's the end game of how you're reacting. People don't have to have a whole kind of PowerPoint presentation about how they're going to undermine somebody's attempts to be independent in order to do that, you can just do that by acting instinctively in a very unself-aware way. It doesn't mean it's better, it just means that the people who make it hard for us to live the lives we need, they're not able to do that because they're smart. 

Carolyn: It's like the whole thing with serial killers where they're so cunning because they're geniuses. And it's like, would a smart person murder someone? 

Sarah: It's yeah, this is like only a hair different from a classic Elle Woods-ism. But I think this is true, and I think many people don't actually realize this, healthy people don't kill people. They just don't. Karen wants to find love, we know this, she wants to get married. But to someone who meets her criteria in which she feels like she needs to feel safe, and she wants kids, there's a quote from when she's interviewed in 1976. She says, “I so much want to start a family. I really want kids. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I could not have children without first being married. I believe in the institution of marriage very strongly. I'm family oriented and I'm proud of it. I had a happy childhood, and I would like to do the kind of job my parents did.”

Carolyn: And I believe her that she had a great childhood, but it's interesting to hear that she felt so positively about it, but then had all of this trouble in adulthood with her family.

Sarah: Yeah. And so much of what the kind of late seventies become for both of them is the struggle to grow up in the public eye. And how both their parents or at least their mother and their public is invested in them remaining frozen in time. They have a rock and roll guitar solo and a song called Goodbye to Love in 1972, and people are freaked out by it. And in an interview Karen says, “It had to be done. We had to shut the goodie two shoes image. It was too much. We're normal, healthy people. We believe people should be free to do what they want to do. Richard is 30 and I'm 26, but the letters we got when we said we weren't virgins read as though we had committed a crime. People must have been dumb to have believed that we were that good.”

Carolyn: Whoa. Can you imagine caring if somebody was a virgin? Well into their, I can't imagine at any age, but especially well into their adulthood.

Sarah: No, it's sick. It's because she has to be a virgin so we can sacrifice her in the volcano. The volcano doesn't accept sluts. 

Carolyn: Yeah. How about this? Healthy people don't care if you're a virgin.

Sarah: I love that. Yeah. That's a shirt. They've had several years in the sun and they are still extremely popular, but they're not the thing of the moment as much anymore. 1978, 1979, people close to Karen really start trying to talk to her about what's going on. It really is becoming; you can't ignore it anymore. 

So Karen makes appointments with a few different psychiatrists in the LA areas. But Karen and Frenda, they have to go together, and Frenda has to stay in the room with her for the entire meeting. And Karen gets very anxious if she has to be alone even momentarily. So while Richard is in rehab for Quaaludes Karen goes to see him and quoting Little Girl Blue, “Karen hesitantly shared her plans to go into the studio to begin recording a solo album. Just two weeks into the six-week program, he was in no condition to hear the sort of news and was understandably livid,” which is what Randy thinks. I think I understand the lividity, but I don't justify it.

Carolyn: I don't understand being livid.

Sarah: That reaction is not about her at all. I think it's about him.

Carolyn: Yeah. In a healthy family, you would be excited for a family member to be going out in a new artistic endeavor. It's just so obviously like, if I don't have Karen, then maybe I won't be making the cultural inroads that I have, or maybe I won't be as successful without Karen. Maybe I'm not enough, or whatever. And Richard, you are enough. You just got to, you got to let her go, bud.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, you do. You got to let her go. And Richard is like, you can't make a solo album. You're too anorexic. You have to get treatment, which is a good point at the wrong time for the wrong reason. Karen is also using laxatives at this time. She also, around this time, or if not now, then a little bit later, is using thyroid medication to control her weight. 

Carolyn: Wait so she's using these medications, not because she's constipated or because she has thyroid. She's using it so that she can stay slim?

Sarah: Yeah. Specifically to at least stay the size she is and potentially keep getting smaller. And again, we've reached the point where it's very hard for her to perform. So she decided to do a solo album. She's going to work with Phil Ramone, who's a big producer of the period. And she becomes really good friends with his wife who's also named Karen, but whose nickname is Itchy? Itchy Ramone. 

Carolyn: Oh, I love that. 

Sarah: Karen is going to do this album with Phil Ramone, and Richard is okay, just promise me one thing. Promise me you won't do a disco album. And then he does do some disco. 

Carolyn: Good for her. 

Carolyn: Good for her!  Yes. Oh my gosh. She's on her own, she's finding her sound. They're working in New York at this point, which is a continent away from Downy. So they cut this album, they did a photo shoot with her for the album art. The proofs come and in Little Girl Blue we read, “Karen was amazed by the transformation. She looked sexy and provocative. She was ecstatic when she showed them to Itchy. Itch will you look at these? She said, her eyes wide and mouth open in astonishment. Yeah. How do you feel about them? Itchy asked. I look pretty, Karen said in astonishment. I actually look pretty. But you've always looked pretty, she was assured.” 

Carolyn: Aw. It makes me happy that she sees an image of herself that she feels happy with, which while she was in California and while she was around her brother and around her family didn't seem possible. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that now that she's out of their orbit, she's maybe feeling a little bit more aligned with how she's presenting. 

Sarah: I feel like sexiness is about a lot of things, but one of them is feeling connected to your authentic self. I think it's hard to feel sexy if you don't feel like you're expressing who you actually are.

Carolyn: Yeah. And independence too. I feel very sexy when I'm doing something that I truly want to be doing.

Sarah: Totally. Because the times when I feel sexy are often when I feel super competent or confident or something like that, sexily putting air in the tires.

Carolyn: But yeah, no, whenever I go, whenever I travel, I often feel very sexy because I'm like, oh, I really think about my wardrobe and what I pack, and I'm like, I have to make sure I have clean clothes and blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff. More than if I'm just sitting around at home like today for example, the same old, and I'm not experiencing novelty and I'm not experiencing independence. I'm just experiencing my everyday going along.

Sarah: Yeah. Not maybe being as present within yourself because of routine. Yeah. And so she feels that way and it is she feels really excited about the album and the team is excited about it. And then it is so hard to hear about what happens next because they finished the tracks. They've invested I think a total of half a million dollars in all this. 

And so they play it for A&M back in LA. And A&M, management is like, we hate it. And then they play it for Richard and he's I hate it. And everyone hates it and they shelve it and they don't release it, and it doesn't come out until after she has died.

Carolyn: I feel like somebody just slit my wrists like I feel blood is draining out of my body right now. 

Sarah: It feels like you have struggled for so long and for so hard to take a step forward and express your authentic self and finally do it for the first time and everyone's this is terrible. Stop doing it. 

Carolyn: God, I know. I don't know if I would be able to try again. 

Sarah: Yeah. And also, it's like her health is so precarious too, so this is easy even physically to just get back on the horse and do it. 

Carolyn: Yeah. It's a tall horse. 

Sarah: Yeah, many hands. Too many hands. So after this happens, Itchy Ramone says, “She was absolutely destroyed by the rejection. 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 went to pieces. It was like somebody just stepped on her and just erased everything she'd worked for.”

Carolyn: God, just heartbreaking. 

Sarah: Karen heads back to LA and she meets a guy named Tom Burris, and Tom does something very sus, which is that he's like, oh, are you a recording artist? I didn't know, I hadn't heard of The Carpenters. And everyone's, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Karen believes it, but her friends sure don't. Because he's doing what every girl who has ever watched a d-com knows to do, which is when you meet someone who's like the famous Jack Jackson, you're like, oh, are you famous? I didn't know that. 

Carolyn: It is interesting because she's been so cautious up to this point about who she decides to be in relationships with. And after this rejection, it makes sense that maybe let her guards down a little bit, but if you were in a d-com and you go up and you're like, oh, I don't even know. I don't even listen to rock music, sorry, Zac Efron. I have no idea who you are. 

Sarah: It's very tween of him. And Itchy Ramone says, “I liked him at first, sort of, but I didn't really believe him. He was blonde 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.” 

And so they get married and they have a big wedding and the only positive thing about that is that Olivia Newton John is a guest at the wedding, and her date is Kenny Ortega. So let's just focus on that for a few moments.

Carolyn:  Oh. Oh, that's perfect. Sarah fodder.

Sarah: It really is.

Carolyn: Okay, so then what was his ulterior motive? 

Sarah: What Karen ultimately says to him after things deteriorate in a manner of a few months is, I'm not a bank. Because he keeps borrowing money from her in large lump sums, tens of thousands of dollars at a time. And in addition to this, before they get married, very soon before they get married, Tom is like, I actually can't have kids, which I know you really want to do because I have had a vasectomy, sorry. And so Karen calls her mom in tears and is like, I have to call off the wedding. And her mom's is like, no, you're not.

Carolyn: Oh, okay. But also vasectomies are reversible. 

Sarah: They are, that's too bad. And they danced their first dance to We've only just Begun. She feels isolated. They moved to Bel Air. He gives her these expensive gifts, which then it turns out that he's leased and is behind on payments for. So the Carpenters put out another album. They do their, Please Mr. Postman cover. They're back to doing the thing that they've always done before, essentially. They're back to trying out, continuing to not change.

Carolyn: Which always works for everyone.

Sarah: Always. And the marriage is really bad. And they have a fight where Tom says he would never have children with her because she's quote, “a bag of bones.”

Carolyn: That's a low blow.

Sarah: It's over very quickly and according to Itchy, “This was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was absolutely the worst thing that could ever have happened to her. She was just so loving and wonderful. And then the next thing you know, you're sitting there across the table from your best friend all bruised up. How do you do that? She was pretty much wrecked.” 

Carolyn: Do you mean like metaphorically banged up or literally like he was abusing her?

Sarah: It's not clear from what I've read, whether this is literal or not. I feel like the door is open for it to not be literal, but like I'm inclined to say it is literal.

Carolyn: Oh, Karen, I'm sorry. If only things had worked out between you and Steve Martin. 

Sarah: I know! That's what I want. And then they could be on TikTok together. She finally returns to trying to get treatment and so she calls this famous not a doctor, kind of falsely represented as a doctor by implication, but a therapist specialized in eating disorders who's famous for it at the time because he's written a book about it that's sold very well named Steven Levekron. So she's in treatment with them. It's supposed to take a year, but she's determined to knock it out in four months. 

Carolyn: Oh my God. That's exactly it. I've had family members who have done that where they're like, yep, I'm in rehab right now and most people do it in 30, but I'm gonna do it in seven.

Sarah: Totally. It's the Andy Bernard approach. So she's in treatment there with him. It doesn't appear to be working, they bring in her family for therapy and especially her mother just like clams up. They're like, you need to tell Karen you love her. And she's like, Karen knows we love her.

Carolyn: Classic silent generation. Being silent. 

Sarah: Being silent as they're known for. Yeah. And so she checks into Lenox Hill Hospital in New York in September 1982 and gets intravenous feeding there where she does gain weight, but doctors identify the toll that all this has taken on her. Her blood potassium level is about half of what it should be at minimum. She's, as I said before, basically half the weight that she was when she started dieting in college. 

And again, to quote the book, “An unexpected complication was discovered later when she complained to the nurse of excruciating chest pain and X-rays revealed the doctors had accidentally punctured one of her lungs and their attempts to insert the tube.” Which is fucking terrifying. 

Carolyn: That's so scary. Yeah. 

Sarah: And while she's in the hospital, she does needle point, which she loves to do. Big needle pointer. And watches I love Lucy.

Carolyn: Oh, that's nice. 

Sarah: And so she gets up to a weight that's closer to healthy. She checks out of the hospital, goes back home to LA and she gives what turns out to be her last public performance at Frenda’s two daughters school.

Carolyn: I don't know. I'm very melancholic that her last performance is connecting with people on a more human level. It makes me happy that she was able to experience that, and it wasn't just to a crowd, which obviously she maybe had some difficulty connecting with crowds. But it doesn't seem that she had trouble connecting with people one-on-one or in smaller environments. So I'm glad to hear that. It also strikes me, it's interesting that they're in a band called Carpenters. And what do you do when you're a carpenter? You carve and it's interesting that like they're in a band called Carpenters and she is being whittled away.

Sarah: Yeah. By her life and by the world that she's in. I really hate how so much of the language around eating disorders, especially in the nineties, implies women are just getting confused and taking things too far, and they're so silly. And if someone tells them that they need to stop doing it, then they'll stop doing it. And it's like, no, it's like addressing the symptoms, but not the sickness to see it that way, I think. 

Carolyn: Absolutely. We keep coming back to the song We've only just Begun, that song in particular seems to have resonated with her enough that she had it as her doorbell. And it strikes me as very, to use the word twice, melancholic because We've Only Just Begun, I can imagine her feeling that. Okay, I'm in this, like her always almost being in the point where she's just begun. She's always almost there, but she has all of these like obstacles, and she's been singing about how we've only just begun for so long and then her life does not really have the opportunity to really begin in earnest ever.

Sarah: Yeah. God. So just the last couple months of her life, she's back in California, she's finalizing her divorce. Fucking Tom is getting a million dollars as his like severance bonus. God damn it. So on February 3rd, she had a conversation with Richard. She's going to get a new VCR quote. He recalled that she yawned a lot during their conversation. She drove to Downey. She and her mom are going to go shopping for a stackable washer dryer unit because she wants one of those for her condo and she wants to shop for it in Downey, because she has always been very attached to doing stuff there. And they don't really find anything. 

They decide that they're going to do it tomorrow. They have dinner at Bob's Big Boy, and she has shrimp salad, which is apparently a favorite of hers. They also have it at her wedding. And she goes to sleep in Richard's room. Richard's old room there, which is where she normally sleeps when she stays over at her parents'. She watches Magnum P.I., she talks to Phil Ramone and talks about her plans to go to New York the next week. Phil says that she talks about listening to their suppressed record and she says, “can I use the F word?” And he like, she can, she says, “I think we made a fucking great album”.  She talks to Frenda before bed. They have plans to get their nails done to celebrate her divorce being finalized.

Carolyn: That's nice.

Sarah: She sounds really tired and she says to Frenda, “I don't know what it is. I just feel like my chest is tired”. Frenda calls Agnes and asks Agnes to check on Karen, which she does. And then the next morning Karen gets up before her parents do, goes downstairs, turns on the coffee pot, goes back upstairs to get dressed in her closet. And Agnes goes upstairs to look for her a bit later and finds her collapsed. And she's rushed to the hospital, and she doesn't make it. 

And it turns out that since she came back from her hospitalization in New York, she has been using ipecac to purge, which is what if you grew up before about 10 years ago, this was something that parents had to have in the cabinet in which you're now not supposed to use on anybody because it has very serious health consequences.

Carolyn: Is that like you have that like in case your kid swallows poison or something? 

Sarah: Yeah, that's what we used to use it for. 

Carolyn: Oh God. Oh Karen. 

Sarah: In an interview that Levekron does, which again, he's not a doctor, so I don't know why they're interviewing him, but he's basing this on the LA Coroner's report. But what he says, “Ipecac slowly dissolves the heart muscle. If you take it day after day, every dose is taking another little piece of that heart muscle apart. Karen, after fighting bravely for a year in therapy, went home and apparently decided that she wouldn't lose any weight with Ipecac, but that she'd make sure she didn't gain any. I'm sure that she thought this was a harmless thing she was doing, but in 60 days she had accidentally killed herself.” 

The news breaks and her family finds out. Her friends find out often by the morning news, because this is the kind of story that goes worldwide instantaneously. I don't know. I have an impulse to do this silver lighting thing and be like, and that really helps shine a light on eating disorders in America. But I don't feel that way. I just hate it. It sucks. 

Carolyn: There's definitely a conversation to be had about legacy but like with any of these women that you've shown light on, I think the point is not that she was her eating disorder, the point is that she was a whole person who was not able to have the control over her life that is necessary to become independent in the ways that you need to be like a healthy adult. We can use this moment to just appreciate her and appreciate the art that she brought into the world. And her voice is so impactful. Not just her singing voice, but her musical voice. Her artistic voice. And I just want to appreciate her for a moment. 

Sarah: We love you, Karen. 

Carolyn: We do. We love you, Karen. Karen didn't know how much we needed her art, and Karen didn't know how much we needed her to be healthy. And I think about people who are struggling right now, and when we're in the middle of difficult times or if we're struggling with our health, mental or emotional or physical, I just want people who are listening to this episode to know that we need you. We just need you. We need you around. You, listening right now. 

Sarah: Yes. We need you. We need you here. You, listening. We need to, you need to stay here with us. 

Carolyn: And also just worth noting, if you are in a family, and I bet you are, if you have an impulse to say oh, I think that my family member should be doing this, or I think my family member should be doing that, maybe just take a step back and think, who is this for? And why do I think that? And what am I doing to actually ensure that my family members and the people that are close to me, have the support and the independence to do the things that they need to do. Your loved ones are going to do things that are annoying and disappointing and incredible, and so we are not the masters of the universe. We are just along for the ride.  

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like it's easy to feel if you grow up watching tiny little VH1 countdown segments about this kind of thing, that recovery, even if people don't come out and say it, I feel like it's easy to get the message that recovery is easy because when you're doing something healthy, you know it's healthy and it feels healthy, and it feels good to be healthy. And if you're doing something self-destructive, it feels bad. And in my experience, that isn't true. 

Carolyn: That's such a great point. 

Sarah: Right? And like Selfness feels great, weirdly, it feels fantastic to destroy yourself, especially if you don't like yourself. And challenging these structures within yourself is terrifying. Just worth pointing out. It's not easy.

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. 

Sarah: So that is the story of Karen Carpenter, and she sang many songs for you. And I thought, Carolyn, I would suggest to you, ending, and you can say, no, it's, this is a weird idea, but because we really can't get away with playing any music in this because we're not rebels like Todd Haynes, I would like us to just sing together a little bit of Sing, which was a big song for the Carpenters shortly after it was a big song on Sesame Street. 

Carolyn: Okay. I think I got at least the first little part. 

Sarah: Okay. Okay. All right. I'm going to cry. I'm going to cry immediately. We love it. Okay. 

Carolyn: 1, 2… 1, 2, 3, 4.

Sarah Sing. 

Carolyn: Sing a song. 

Sarah: Sing out loud. 

Carolyn: Sing out strong. 

Sarah: Sing of good things, not bad. Sing of happy, not sad. 

Caroline: Oh, that's so great.

Sarah: La, la, la, la, la, la. 

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing this episode. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this episode. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for co-hosting this episode with me. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. See you in two weeks.