Little Girl Blue (16 page)

Within weeks of the radio debut of “Goodbye to Love,” the Carpenters began receiving what amounted to hate mail from fans who felt the song desecrated the group's image with the incorporating of a grungy-sounding guitar. “
That was the first ballad
ever done with any sort of rock and roll sensibility,” Bettis explained. “Aggressive electric guitar the way it was beginning to be used. There was a schism in instrumentation. It's a watershed record, sonically, because Richard put two disparate worlds together. There was a legion of Carpenters fans that wasn't ready for that, but I think it also garnered new fans.”

By mid-1972, Peluso had accepted an offer to become a full-fledged member of the Carpenters' touring band. As the entourage grew to fourteen, the need for adequate transportation was filled with the acquisition
of two Learjets, aptly named
Carpenter 1
and
Carpenter 2
, which were used to travel between one-nighters. It was on one such trip that Bettis came up with the song title “Top of the World.” According to the lyricist, “
When I got in
the plane and took off I thought, ‘Are we on top of the world now or what? Look at this!' I saw the visual symbolism. I was at the top of the world. I took the title and wrote it with another guy, Kerry Chater. The song never came to be anything. Somehow Richard came in contact with the title again and remembered it from the airplane experience.”

Resuming work with Richard, Bettis came up with what he considered to be “the best rhyme scheme I ever executed with the Carpenters. I don't know whether anybody's ever noticed, but that was a tricky rhyme scheme to keep up: ‘In the leaves on the trees / And the touch of the breeze / There's a pleasin' sense of happiness for me.'”

The Carpenters recorded “Goodbye to Love” and “Top of the World” for what became their
A Song for You
album released in June 1972. Richard heard the title song on Leon Russell's debut album and felt it would be well suited to their style. “A Song for You” is considered by many to be a contemporary standard and has since been recorded by a range of artists from Willie Nelson to Michael Bublé. The haunting melody and touching lyric combined for one of Karen's finest performances, but, although figured to be a single, it was overlooked because of its duration; it was considered to be too long for Top 40 radio. Stephen Holden of
Rolling Stone
took notice and called it “
far and away
the album's finest moment. It is a great song that is rapidly achieving the classic status it deserves, and Karen communicates its poignancy with effortless serenity.”

Also on the album was “Hurting Each Other,” which Richard first heard on KRLA in 1969. Incidentally, it was an A&M Records release by Ruby and the Romantics and one that he later came across in the stockroom on the lot shortly after having signed with the label. He played it, put it away, and was reminded of it again in 1971 while playing arbitrary chord changes on his electric piano during a sound check. His up-tempo-to-ballad formula (à la “Ticket to Ride”) worked again, and “Hurting Each Other” became the Carpenters' next hit single.
Nilsson's “Without You” held the #1 spot this time as “Hurting” tried for two weeks to break through. It was the Carpenters' fourth #2 single but the sixth in a string of #1 hits on the Adult Contemporary chart.

Almost as random a discovery was “It's Going to Take Some Time.” Richard first heard the song on a quad test pressing of Carole King's
Music
LP played by the engineers installing the Carpenters' new quadraphonic sound system at Newville in the fall of 1971.

Roger Nichols and Paul Williams considered “I Won't Last a Day Without You” to be a complete song with just two verses and a chorus, just as they submitted it to the Carpenters on a demo in 1971. They struggled to honor Karen's last-minute request for an additional bridge and third verse. “We finally worked it out and went in and did the demo the day before they recorded it,” Nichols recalls. “They were screaming at us to get it to them and were upset with us because they were right down to the wire in the studio. What bothered me was that I heard Richard never even listened to the demo. He just looked at the sheet music and started changing it. It was kind of a sore point with me because he changed the melody in the bridge and the chord structure. After that, other people heard our version of the song—like Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross—and they all recorded the version as we had written it. I always felt that if the Carpenters had cut a better bridge it would have been a bigger song for them.”

Sadly, the Nichols-Williams partnership came to an end in 1972, shortly after the Carpenters' release of
A Song for You
. “Paul wanted to be a star himself,” Nichols recalls. “He was taking off and hired managers and lawyers and left me in the dust there. We stopped writing. It just wasn't happening.”

The partnership between the Carpenters and producer Jack Daugherty came to an end around this time as well. Richard was enraged to read a review of their latest album in
Cashbox
magazine praising Daugherty's production abilities. Karen and Richard had remained faithful to Daugherty since he helped get their demo into the hands of Herb Alpert three years earlier, but over time this loyalty began to wane. Despite Daugherty's billing as producer, those were Richard's
arrangements and Richard's productions. Some called Daugherty the Glenn Miller of the 1970s, but as far as the Carpenters were concerned he was more of an A & R man than a sound architect. He did offer production advice, but most of his time was spent booking studios and musicians, in addition to searching for potential musical material. “In the beginning Jack was the avenue between us and the Carpenters,” says Roger Nichols. “He'd always say, ‘Have you got anything new? What's happening? Let me hear your songs,' and so on. Later on Richard and Karen really were on the outs with him. Richard didn't need anybody to do that anymore. He felt that he was producing the records and Jack was just putting his name on them.”

By 1972 Daugherty had his own secretary at A&M Records and was earning a $25,000 annual salary as staff producer for the label, in addition to his earnings from the sale of every Carpenters record. According to Allyn Ferguson, who worked with Daugherty and the Carpenters, “Jack just took a ride. He got credit for it, but he was not really a producer. He wasn't even at A&M before them. He was just the liaison between the Carpenters and A&M in the beginning, having initially brought them to Herb.”

Hal Blaine claims to have stayed out of such politics, but he witnessed similar conflicts between artists and producers over the years. “I spent years with John Denver, and his ‘producer' would be fast asleep in a booth. It was the musicians who made the records, but once a group gets rid of the producer and starts saying ‘we can make our own records,' that's usually the beginning of the end of the group.”

Asked in a 1973 UK press conference what part Daugherty had played in creating the Carpenters sound, Richard responded firmly: “
Nothing. That's why
he's no longer with us. We produced all those singles. It's a long story, but Jack had nothing to do with anything. He was responsible for getting Herb Alpert to hear our tape, which was very nice, but he wasn't our producer. You'll notice he hasn't had one record on any chart since he left us.”

Once terminated, Jack Daugherty took the matter to court, where he claimed that the firing had destroyed his credibility in the music industry. The battle took some nine years to settle, finally going to trial
in 1981. Although the court found in favor of A&M and the Carpenters, their defense cost the record company between $350,000 and $400,000. Three years after Daugherty's 1991 death, Michael Daugherty sought to vindicate his father's contributions to the Carpenters' music. “
The man who produced
the lion's share of the Carpenters' hits was my late father, Jack Daugherty. . . .,” he wrote in a letter to the
Los Angeles Times
. “Richard Carpenter seems intent on trivializing Daugherty's inestimable influence in the creation of the Carpenters' sound. . . . My father would have enjoyed knowing that the sound he fashioned more than twenty years ago continues to be appreciated by so many.”

A
N UNLIKELY
friendship was born when Karen began to reach out more and more to Frenda Franklin. “Can we go shopping sometime?” Karen would ask. Or “Could I go to the hairdresser with you?” Initially Karen had been intimidated by Frenda's affluent lifestyle, fine clothing, and expensive jewelry. She seemed in awe of the woman's sense of style and sophistication. Frenda was five years Karen's senior and over time became her closest confidante and mentor. “Karen became like a baby sister to me,” Frenda explains. “We became friends. Slowly.”

Karen admitted she had been jealous and apologized to Frenda for having been so impolite when the two first met and begged forgiveness. Frenda was taken aback. She was astonished that someone so supremely gifted and amazingly talented could be jealous of anyone.

“You really don't have any idea, do you?” she said.

“About what?” Karen asked.

“About how good you are. If you did, you wouldn't be jealous of anybody.”

Karen refused the compliment, instead reiterating her apologies for having been disrespectful. “Well, you were just
awful
,” Frenda confirmed, and the two laughed over what in retrospect seemed insignificant.

Shopping with Frenda on Rodeo Drive and around Beverly Hills, Karen was unsure of the proper etiquette used in such upscale stores and boutiques. She was terribly nervous that she might say or do something
inappropriate. “Now Frenny, if I go into a store and I do something wrong you'll tell me, right?” she asked.

“Let's get this straight,” Frenda said. “I wouldn't want you to go in there and do a cartwheel, but Karen, they want your
money
!”

As their friendship grew, Frenda became one of the few people in whom Karen placed all confidence. “There were things Karen would never ever tell anyone, but maybe Frenda,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “She talked to Frenda a lot about things that happened with her mother.” Around her parents, especially her mother, Karen became nervous about what might be said or done in Frenda's presence. The fact that Franklin came from a large Jewish family did not dissuade Agnes Carpenter from voicing her anti-Semitic opinions around her. Karen would apologize profusely for her mother's words and attempt to explain away the ignorant comments and how they stemmed from Agnes's upbringing.

“On one level, they were very good people,” Franklin says of the Carpenter parents. “Harold was the greatest. What a doll. What a sweet, sweet man.” Evelyn Wallace agrees, recalling Harold as a quiet man who was nice to everybody. “He was a real sweetheart, and I admired him so much,” she says. “Many times I wondered how he could live with that woman the way she used to yell and scream at him. She would jump on him, and he would never ever fight back. He just sat there and took it. He wasn't a sissy but just a real nice guy. Agnes was the speaker, so he wasn't really one to get a word in edgewise.”

“Agnes kind of has a mean streak in her sometimes,” Harold told Evelyn in the home office one afternoon.

“Yeah, I kind of noticed that!” she said sarcastically.

“Harold wasn't allowed to have an opinion,” Frenda says. “Agnes was a bulldozer. In my own way I loved her. She was Karen's mother, and she gave her life. But I was sorry that she had so many prejudices. She used really bad language, too. I'd never known anyone that called somebody the
n
-word. Those things do not go down well with me. I was shocked.” The Jackson Five was the target of such talk on several occasions, and Karen was mortified when her mother would make such bigoted comments. She seemed ashamed and wanted very much to dissociate herself from what she saw as dogmatic narrow-mindedness.
“Oh, Frenny, you're still going to be friends with me, right?” she'd ask apprehensively. “You're not going to hold it against me, are you?”

“Kace [a nickname derived from K.C.], of course not,” Frenda would tell her again and again. “It's nothing to do with you. Don't be silly.”

This reaction from Karen was nothing unusual. She was a people pleaser with a strong desire to keep everyone around her happy, even if it came at her own expense. Her closest friends knew she was sensitive and vulnerable, and neither quality could withstand her mother's brutality. Somewhere along the way Karen had adopted a rugged exterior—an almost masculine facade—to protect herself from her mother's unapologetic harshness. She struggled with femininity, and many who were close to her say Karen always remained childlike, like a little girl who never really grew up or blossomed into a woman. In a 1974
Rolling Stone
cover story, even Tom Nolan remarked on Karen's perceived immaturity. “
Karen is in some ways
like a child,” he wrote, “which is not surprising. A star since nineteen, a committed musician even longer than that, she probably missed out on one or two normal stages of adaptation to ‘the real world.'”