Little Girl Blue (24 page)

W
HEN
K
AREN
began dating tall, handsome record executive Mike Curb, the new love interest became a much-needed distraction from her brother's personal affairs. “It evolved,” Curb recalls of his relationship with Karen. “Richard and I both had sisters, and I think we were all very comfortable together.” The sibling friendships began when Mike and his sister Carole joined Karen and Richard for dinners in the home of mutual friends Ed and Frenda Leffler. The couples also enjoyed evenings of conversation over food and wine at Jack's at the Beach, a favorite restaurant on the Ocean Park Pier in Santa Monica.

Mike was taken with Karen's love of life, music, and children. In return, she was impressed by his kindhearted personality, his confident
nature, and his good looks. In contrast with Karen's history of sabotaging her brother's relationships, Richard was thrilled with her choice of mate this time. “I think Richard was happy that she was dating someone, and I think he liked me,” Curb says. “I liked him.” Richard and Mike started a tradition of music trivia matches. “He was certainly a much better musician than I, but at the time I was a successful record producer.” In addition to the Osmonds, Curb produced Donny Osmond as a solo artist and was just beginning to work with the sibling duo of Donny and Marie. He was named
Billboard
Producer of the Year for 1972 in recognition of his production of both Sammy Davis Jr.'s “The Candy Man” and Donny Osmond's “Puppy Love.” He would later produce Debby Boone's “You Light Up My Life,” the biggest selling record of the decade.

Visiting the Carpenters at A&M Records was a treat for Curb, who enjoyed watching other artists work and the various production techniques employed. “Being a producer, I marveled at the way Richard and Karen worked together,” he says. “Neither one of them ever made small talk. It was always music, records, or something she'd heard on the radio. I have never seen any two people more committed to their careers. Their records never sounded overproduced. They were perfectly produced, but they had just enough edge that they were really right for the moment and the radio.”

Karen and Mike found it taxing to juggle their busy careers and still make time for dates and other opportunities to be together. “I was running MGM Records and producing records at that time, and she was constantly recording and traveling,” Curb explains. “She would go away on international tours for quite a while, so we were unable to spend as much time together as we wanted to.” When openings in their schedules did coincide, Karen and Mike would drive to Newport Beach or San Diego for a boat ride around the harbor.

For their dinner dates, Curb would often drive to Newville to pick up his girlfriend. “I could have been picking up the girl next door,” he says, recalling her unaffected personality. “She never ever got caught up in the trappings of being a successful artist. Aside from maybe a gold record on the wall or a Grammy award on the table, it was just like you
were going to your next-door neighbor's home. It was such a pleasure to be with her because she just loved music, loved life, loved her family, and was so unaffected. I never remember her going out and buying clothes or talking about trendy things. To her, her whole world was her brother, her family, the parents.”

Although they sometimes went for dinner at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, both Karen and Mike favored intimate surroundings. “Both of us preferred something more private,” he says. “Not something where fifty people would come up to us. But I went to the Grammys with her and the American Music Awards, too, so we did some public things.” One of the couple's first public outings was a double date with Richard and Randy Bash to the Grammy Awards on March 2, 1974, Karen's twenty-fourth birthday.

From the start of their relationship, Curb recalls Karen was always on a diet. “She was always concerned that when she ate her weight went to her hips, so she wouldn't eat,” he says. “She always worried about her hips, and that's one of the reasons she wanted to stay at the drums.” On May 22, 1974, the Carpenters were photographed at home by Annie Leibovitz for an upcoming
Rolling Stone
cover story. Karen was pleased to have lost some excess weight around her arms and buttocks, and to show off her new figure she wore a new pair of jeans and a tank top. It was a casual and laid-back approach, in contrast with the years of posing cheek to cheek with Richard, wearing matching formalwear. Karen looked radiant and was the picture of good health. Friends were noticing and telling her how great she looked, but no one saw it as obsessive in the beginning, just normal dieting.

Initially, Curb was not alarmed either, but as time went on he started to recognize Karen was establishing the eating patterns and rituals that would proliferate over the coming years. “I noticed very definitely that she was trying to lose weight by just not eating. She would order a meal and maybe eat 25 percent of her food. She was just sort of moving the food around her plate. My sister Carole had the same problem. She and Karen would just
not eat
.”

During their dinners, Karen reminded Mike her diet was such a success she could not stop and risk gaining the weight back. “You look
great
,” he affirmed. “Now let's eat!” Or he would say, “You only ate a third of your plate. Let's stay until you eat it all.” With his urging, she would usually eat her entire meal. Even Richard noticed that Karen seemed to behave differently and eat more sensibly in Mike's presence. “How are you getting her to eat?” he asked.

“I would actually
insist
that she eat,” Curb says. “I would tell her that she looked great and that she should eat. And she would eat!”

After dinner, Mike would sometimes drive Karen to A&M, where she would meet Richard for a recording session. “She liked to record at night,” Curb says. “I stayed enough to see how incredibly talented Richard was. He was amazing, and she had such respect for him. I remember just being stunned.” Curb was even more amazed when he first heard Karen's voice up close and unaccompanied while driving with her to A&M. “She was rehearsing a song and looking at a piece of sheet music,” he says. “When she sang in a car you could barely hear her voice, but when she got on a microphone it was like velvet. It was a very, very amazing thing. So many singers think they always have to belt out a song. Karen had one of the softest voices in the world, but when you put that voice on a
microphone
?!”

Despite the couple's commonalities and mutual admiration, dates between Karen and Mike Curb became more and more sporadic due to their career obligations, and they grew apart. “She went on a long tour, and we started seeing each other less and less,” Curb recalls. “It was really two people that were just so busy. It never really broke up.”

D
ESPITE THE
fact that the Carpenters' greatest successes stemmed from their recordings, they spent the majority of their professional time on tour. The average Carpenters record took between four and five months to produce. The remainder of the year was spent playing night after night across the country and around the world, in addition to making various personal and television appearances. In 1971 the Carpenters played upward of 150 shows. During 1972 and 1973 they did 174 concerts each year. After six weeks of one-nighters—which was common during those seasons—Karen and Richard were exhausted. While they
enjoyed performing, it became a never-ending succession of plane trips, motels, hotels, rehearsals, and sound checks that got them down.

The year 1974 began with the Carpenters greatest hits album,
The Singles 1969–1973
, topping the
Billboard
album charts in the United States. The collection was the duo's first and only #1 album, fueled by nine previous million-sellers, and sales would eventually top twelve million units in the United States alone. It also topped the UK album chart for seventeen weeks between February and July.

The promotional push for the
Singles
album came in the form of the duo's second #1 single, “Top of the World.” The Carpenters and A&M Records had certainly underestimated the song's potential when recorded for 1972's
A Song for You
. All involved felt it was a nice album cut but never considered it for single release. Some Top 40 stations had programmed the song based solely upon requests, and in Japan it was culled as a single and quickly went to #1. Carpenters audiences had broken into applause at just the mention of the song once they added it to their live set in the summer of 1972. “
All of a sudden
people were standing up and cheering,” John Bettis recalled. “Richard was kind of scratching his head and saying, ‘What
is
all this?'”

When it came around to the
Singles
album, Richard decided “Top of the World” simply must be the next Carpenters single. “
A&M took a little
bit of convincing,” Bettis said. “We're talking about the group that did ‘Superstar,' “We've Only Just Begun,' and ‘Goodbye to Love' coming along with a country number.” Karen re-recorded her lead vocal, and other alterations were made to the recording before the new “Top of the World” was remixed and readied for release. “Then Richard had to hold the release of our single,” Bettis said. Country crooner Lynn Anderson released her version of the song—a virtual clone of Richard's arrangement—which quickly climbed to #2 on the country music chart. “We didn't want to make anybody mad because we killed their record,” explained Bettis. “We actually had to wait to release that record until Lynn Anderson's had died off the charts.”

Additionally, the Carpenters' debut single, “Ticket to Ride,” got a facelift for
The Singles
. The original 1969 version was a rare instance where tape captured Karen singing consistently under pitch. Drums
were re-recorded, Tony Peluso added a guitar track, and Karen cut a much-improved lead vocal for the new release.

Following the hits album's success came a year of 203 concerts with sold-out tours across Europe, Japan, and the United States. A weeklong stop at New York's Westbury Music Fair was followed by two separate four-week stints in Las Vegas at the Riviera and two weeks at the Sahara in Lake Tahoe. The October run at the Riviera was recorded for an intended live album release that never came to fruition. They also participated in a televised concert with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops and, as they had done in 1971, sold out 18,000 seats to fill the Hollywood Bowl.

Leaving Los Angeles on May 27, the Carpenters headed to Japan, where their shows were enjoyed by 85,000 fans. Tickets to their three weeks of concerts had sold out in less than an hour. “It was during their golden years when they were bigger than the Beatles,” says Denny Brooks, a Cal State Long Beach alumnus who frequently toured as the Carpenters' opening act. “I'm an old folkie from the sixties. I really never had any great record success. I was just a good, working act. They were touring all these different countries, and instead of taking a comedian like a lot of these acts did during that time, they took me, just a guy and his guitar.”

The Carpenters likened their 1974 touchdown in Japan to the Beatles on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, a mob scene of screaming fans rocking the limousines and pulling at their clothes. “It was outrageous,” Brooks says. “Five thousand people at the Tokyo airport was really crazy, but it was a good time. I remember us doing one-nighters all over Japan, something like twenty-eight nights in thirty days in every single town.”

Surprisingly, no one in the Carpenters' entourage ever complained to management about the grueling touring schedule the group was subjected to. Richard felt they were not so much overworked but overbooked. “
I don't think he
was ever truly happy on the road,” Sherwin Bash recalled. But Bash continued to book them, filling each and every open date in their already bulging itineraries. “They were always huffing and puffing about having such a grueling schedule,” Maria Galeazzi
recalls. “These managers don't have any mind for the long run. They want to get the most of them—get it and get it now. . . . Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and you don't know where you are. The schedule was usually six weeks in a row, which takes its toll, not so much on the other people but on Karen.”

Signs of Karen's stress would surface from time to time, as A&M Records' UK press officer Brian Southall remembers. He received a warning from others at the label in advance of the Carpenters' arrival in London that year. “Karen's the one you don't cross,” he was told. “
Karen was on an edge
,” Southall later recalled. “You crossed her at your peril. That was sort of the warning we were given before we started.” One evening during a sold-out charity show at the Talk of the Town nightclub, the band was having fun and enjoying some spontaneity in their performance during the last night of the show. “But that was not allowed to happen,” Southall observed. “[Karen] was on them like a ton of bricks. The show had to be
exactly
the same as every other show they had done. It was the first time that I had realized that the ad-libs were actually not ad-libs, they were the same ad-libs from the night before. . . . The guys in the band weren't drunk, they weren't falling about. They just wanted to have a little bit of spontaneity. It was frightening to watch when these guys got torn apart.”