Little Girl Blue (51 page)

O
N
F
RIDAY
morning, February 4, Karen awoke and went downstairs to the kitchen, where she turned on the coffeepot her mother had prepared the night before. She went back upstairs to get dressed. Around 8:45
A.M.
Agnes Carpenter heard the heavy mirrored closet doors slide open above her and Harold's bedroom. “Karen's up,” she said, getting up and heading to the kitchen, where she habitually prepared hot cereal and coffee each morning.

On the kitchen counter she saw the percolator Karen had hooked up and the place settings she had prepared—two cups for coffee and two bowls for the cereal. “Before she had always set it for herself, too,” Evelyn Wallace says, “along with a bunch of pills the doctor gave her to take. This particular morning it was just a cup for Harold and one for Agnes; nothing for Karen.”

Rather than shouting for Karen when the coffee was ready, Agnes picked up the multiline phone and dialed the upstairs bedroom phone,
but its ring, heard faintly in the distance, went unanswered. Agnes went to the foot of the stairs and called to her daughter. She continued calling for Karen as she climbed the stairs, but there was no response. Entering the room, Agnes found Karen's motionless, nude body lying facedown on the closet floor. Her eyes were open but rolled back. She was lying in a straight line and did not appear to have fallen. “
She had just laid down
on the floor and that was it,” Agnes recalled. “I picked her up and I called to her and held her.” She screamed to Harold to call for help.

“She was out on the floor when I got there,” recalls Florine Elie, who arrived just after Agnes discovered Karen unconscious. “It must have been just before 9:00. She was out on the floor, and I am pretty sure she was dead there at the house.”

The Downey Fire Department received Harold Carpenter's call at 8:51
A.M.
and dispatched Engine Company No. 64 as well as a nearby paramedic unit. “They were there so fast, pulling me off,” recalled Agnes, who herself attempted to resuscitate her daughter.

The three firemen from Downey Fire Squad 841 and two paramedics from Adams Ambulance Service in Santa Fe Springs found Karen to be unconscious but detected a slight pulse. “
It was a chilling scene
,” paramedic Bob Gillis recalled to reporters. “Karen looked frail and very thin. She was completely nude.” A faint pulse was detected in her neck with her heart beating only every ten seconds. “This is a sure sign of a dying heart,” Gillis said. The crew moved her from the closet to the bedroom, where they began performing CPR and finally asked that Harold escort his distressed wife from the room.

Agnes rushed down the stairs and phoned Richard. Like many musicians, Richard was a night owl and still sound asleep when the call came in around 8:55
A.M.
So panic-stricken was Agnes that her son had trouble understanding her hysterical cries. Finally realizing Karen was unconscious, Richard threw on a T-shirt and blue jeans and tore out of the house.

Arriving for what she thought to be an ordinary day at work, Evelyn Wallace was startled to see emergency vehicles outside the house and grew worried about Harold Carpenter. “Harold was the first one I
thought of,” she says. “He had heart trouble and had to take a number of pills for his heart.” Hurrying into the house, Evelyn was met with Agnes, sobbing as she held tightly to a railing that separated the entry from the living room. “Agnes, what's the matter?” she asked.

There was no response. “Agnes couldn't talk. She was crying and just waved me up the stairs. I went upstairs and saw they had Karen on a gurney. I could tell they were working on her heart.”

Driving frantically from Lubec Street, Richard hoped it was only a collapse, perhaps even one severe enough to persuade Karen to take her condition more seriously. He began to cry as he rounded the corner onto Newville in time to witness paramedics exiting the house with the gurney. With full lights and siren, the ambulance transported Karen's lifeless body and her shaken mother, still in her robe, to Downey Community Hospital. Richard and Harold were instructed to follow cautiously.

Arriving at 9:23
A.M.,
the unidentified patient was reportedly in full cardiac arrest, not breathing and without a heartbeat. “All we knew was that we were getting a thirty-two-year-old female in full arrest,” says Pat Tomlin, RN, who worked in the emergency room. “When she arrived, the first thing that shocked me was her size. She was so frail and fragile looking.”

Paramedics told the ER staff, “This is the lady who came from the Carpenter house in north Downey,” perhaps a subtle attempt to establish identity without compromising her privacy. In the field the team of paramedics had been unsuccessful in establishing an intravenous line after several attempts, so Tomlin continued the effort. Nurse manager Vivian Carr sat with Richard and Harold, who joined Agnes in a conference room adjacent to the emergency room. Inside, the crew went to work in further attempts at saving Karen. As personnel took their places, Dr. Irv Edwards reached for a laryngoscope and began the intubation process. A young respiratory technician and Carpenter family friend stepped forward with the respirator and began securing the bag and mask. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “It's
Karen
!” The woman's voice cut through the room's intensity, and she began to sob hysterically. The others were quite perplexed by the outburst.

“What's going on? What's wrong with you?” Nurse Tomlin asked her.

“It's Karen,” she replied. “It's
Karen Carpenter
!”

Several members of the ER crew, including Tomlin, leaned over the bed for a closer look. “Holy shit,” she cried. “It is!” She was shocked to realize this body belonged to the youthful girl she knew only from the Carpenters' album covers. Tomlin knew the words to most of the Carpenters' hit songs, and the lyric to one of them immediately ran through her head: “So much of life ahead . . . And yes, we've just begun.” Tomlin sent one of the staff members to notify the hospital manager. “We knew this was going to turn into the nightmare from hell, publicity-wise.”

Dr. Edwards was less concerned with the pending media circus and recalls only thinking of the Carpenter family. “This was an incredibly young woman who was too young to die,” he says. “What a terrible, terrible, terrible family tragedy this was. They were an extraordinarily popular and much beloved family in Downey, and she was a hometown celebrity.”

The medical team at Downey Community spent twenty-eight minutes attempting to resuscitate Karen. “We worked on her for quite a while but then ended up calling the code,” Tomlin says. At 9:51
A.M.,
Karen Anne Carpenter was pronounced dead.

Dr. Edwards emerged from the emergency room and entered the room where Harold, Agnes, and Richard were huddled. The rueful words stumbled from his mouth: “I'm sorry, but Karen is dead.” This was a heartrending but not uncommon task the doctor was required to carry out time and time again. “It's never easy to tell a family that someone they love and is dear to them has died,” he says. “Richard was fairly composed. Incredulous, but somewhat composed. The parents were absolutely in a state of disbelief.”

“Are you
sure
she's gone?” they asked. “Can't you do
anything
to bring her back?”

“We took some time to explain things to the parents,” Edwards recalls, “and grieve with the family.” Richard was angry. Agnes and Harold were numb. Their faces filled with tears before asking, “May we see her?”

D
ISPATCHED TO
Downey Community Hospital at 9:55
A.M.
for a “possible overdose,” patrolman J. Rice of the Downey Police Department spoke with Dr. Edwards and his staff, who advised him of Karen's history of anorexia nervosa and depression. “She was extraordinarily thin and what I would describe as gaunt looking,” recalls Dr. Edwards. “She did have the appearance or the persona of a person who had anorexia nervosa. In part of my evaluation of Karen we did test her blood sugar, and it was very, very elevated.” Tests revealed a blood sugar level of 1,110, which equated to approximately ten times the norm. In Dr. Edwards's opinion, the immediate cause of death was a “hyperosmolar diabetic coma.”

Patrolman Rice questioned Karen's parents at the hospital before escorting them home. The family's agony and anguish during the three-mile drive back to Newville without Karen was immeasurable. By the time Harold, Agnes, and Richard returned, the street had been barricaded by local authorities who were stationed at the corner to assist in providing some sort of privacy for the grief-stricken family. National and local media soon swarmed the neighborhood. Heartbroken fans overtaken with sorrow and disbelief gathered behind police lines after hearing the news: “Singer Karen Carpenter, who helped put soft rock at the top of the charts, is dead at the age of thirty-two of a heart attack.”

Running errands in anticipation of spending the afternoon with Karen, Frenda Leffler was driving up Palm Drive in Beverly Hills when she caught a special report on the radio. “I almost ran into a tree,” she recalls. “Of course I didn't believe it. I went home and I was just in a daze. I opened the back door and I saw Eddie, who was never home early. . . . He looked at me and said, ‘She's gone.' Even though we should have known, you don't want to believe that something is really going to happen. You want to think that your loving her was going to make everything all right. But the last blow with this marriage was just more than her little body could take.”

Olivia Newton-John also heard the news on her car radio as she traveled down a Los Angeles freeway. “It was a terrible shock,” she says.
“I was meeting someone I didn't even know for a business lunch at the Melting Pot on Melrose. I was still in shock, and when I sat down I just burst into tears. . . . It was just horrendous and such a shock. Poor girl, she'd been through a lot. We were supposed to have lunch the next day.”

Returning from a business meeting of her own, Itchie Ramone arrived home to the sounds of ringing phones and the voices of a small group of friends crowded around her husband in the middle of the couple's living room. “Have you listened to the radio this morning?” he asked.

“No, I just went to the meeting and came out. Why?” She was alarmed to realize the room had fallen silent. “What's going on?” she asked.

“It's about Karen,” Phil said cautiously.

“Oh good God, what has she done now?” she laughed, but Phil remained serious.

“What's wrong? Phil, what's the matter? Is she ill? Is she in the hospital? What's wrong with her?”

“It was her heart,” he said.

“It was her
heart
? Is she dead? Did she die?”

As Karen had predicted, Phil and Itchie welcomed their new baby boy, B. J. Ramone, the following week on February 7.

At Cal State Long Beach, Frank Pooler was in a rehearsal when his assistant heard the news reports over the radio. “Come on, let's go over to the office,” the assistant told him. “I've got some sad news for you. Karen just died.”

Pooler attempted to reach Richard, who proved to be incommunicado. “I went down to the house that night. It was all cordoned off with cops so I just gave them a letter for Richard. I volunteered the choir for anything they might want to have sung at the service.”

John Bettis was in a writing session in Nashville. “
Those things don't hit you
right off,” he recalled. “It's almost as if you're watching a TV show or something. It's an out-of-body experience.” He immediately called Richard and was surprised to get through. “I don't know how you feel, but I'm mad as hell,” he told Richard, later regretting
the words he came to feel were egocentric. “The selfishness of my first reaction has haunted me because I actually felt as if Karen had taken something from me that I didn't want to be without. My first reaction was, ‘How selfish of you.' Isn't that odd? Since then I've had the other emotions, but that was the first one. I felt cheated.”

Richard agreed. “
My immediate reaction
was anger,” he told
People Weekly
in 1983. “Anger at the waste of her life and the loss of her talent. Then the grief set in. The shock was tremendous—I knew she was ill but not that ill.” He also admitted to being angry with himself, the therapists, the doctors, and the hospitals.

In Connecticut, C. J. Cuticello raced to get in touch with his wife, Debbie. “Before you turn on the radio or do anything, this is what has happened,” he said.

Shaken and stunned by her husband's words, Debbie spent the day recalling her special memories of Karen. “Disbelief,” she says. “That was a hard day. That was tough.” Bittersweet were her emotions as she went to the mailbox the next day only to find the photos Karen had sent after what proved to be their final phone conversation a few days earlier.