Little Girl Blue (54 page)

Prior to the film's release, Haynes had attempted to license a number of original Carpenters recordings and other music for the production, but his requests were denied. When he proceeded to use the material for which he was denied permission, legal injunctions from Richard Carpenter ensued, and the film was withdrawn from distribution in 1990. In an open letter to Richard, Owen Gleiberman of
Entertainment Weekly
asked, “
Will you please allow
people to see Todd Haynes's
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
?” and called it “one of the most startling, audacious and sheerly emotional films of the past decade.” Gleiberman asserted that the film was not just a case study but a tribute to the duo's musical legacy. “Todd Haynes has turned Karen Carpenter's life into a singular work of art. Even for those who never cared about the Carpenters' music (but especially for those who did), it deserves to be seen.”

In Richard's response, which appeared in the publication the following month, he explained that his issue with the film related not to its content but to the filmmaker's behavior. The fact remained that Haynes had distributed the film to numerous theaters after having been denied permission to utilize the Carpenters' recordings. According to Richard, “
His decision to make
his movie using this material amounted to a deliberate attack on the rights of those who Gleiberman now suggests ought to give their blessing to Haynes's exhibition of the movie.”

The catalyst for a sweeping renaissance of interest in Karen's story and the music of the Carpenters came on January 1, 1989, with the premiere of
The Karen Carpenter Story
on CBS-TV. The revival has continued in varying degrees to this day. The New Year's Day airing took advantage of a captive holiday viewing audience, and the movie finished in first place for its rating week with 41 percent of televisions tuned in. It was the highest-rated television movie licensed by CBS in
five years and second most watched for all of 1989, behind
I Know My First Name Is Steven
. “Carpenters Telepic Boosts Record Sales” reported
Variety
. According to their research, sales of the Carpenters' catalog soared some 400 percent in the two weeks immediately following the broadcast on CBS. Absent from record store shelves was a tie-in or soundtrack release. Two previously unreleased recordings debuted in the film, “You're the One” and “Where Do I Go from Here,” outtakes from 1977 and 1978 respectively. Both appeared on
Lovelines
, a new Carpenters album released ten months later in October.

There had been more than twenty years of jibes and sneers—two decades of dismissing even Karen's best recordings as bland, homogenized, or saccharine sweet—but with the airing of this low-budget dramatization, prejudice against the Carpenters' recordings began to fade, revealing an extraordinary change in perception. Over time, Karen found her rightful home alongside other timeless vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and Sarah Vaughan. Not just that, but retro was in. At times it seemed almost cool to like the Carpenters. “
Maybe it's just
an overdue appreciation of a singer who, despite some terrible material, always had a pure pop voice,” wrote Stephen Whitty in an article for the
San Jose Mercury News
. “Or maybe it's simply a twinge of '70s nostalgia. For baby boomers in their twenties, ‘Close to You' was part of their AM-radio childhoods. But the Carpenters are back. And it's only just begun. Again.”

The revival made its way from the United States to the United Kingdom, where in 1990 a “greatest hits” compilation,
Only Yesterday
, held the #1 spot for a total of seven weeks. Carpenters tribute acts surfaced in the United Kingdom as well. One featuring vocalist Wendy Roberts was even praised by Richard Carpenter, who was amazed to learn the act had sold out the London Palladium, just as the Carpenters had (many times over) in 1976.

Next came
The Carpenters: The Untold Story
, an authorized biography by former
Melody Maker
editor-in-chief Ray Coleman, who previously authored books about Eric Clapton, the Beatles, and others. Bound by restraints similar to those imposed on the writers of the 1989 TV movie, the author skirted around certain subjects and overlooked
others altogether in order to craft a book deemed worthy of the Carpenter family's stamp of approval. That same year, it was Coleman who proclaimed the musical duo “
too good to be through
” in a feature for
The Sunday Times
in London. “There is little doubt that Karen would have enjoyed all the commotion,” he wrote. “Fiercely ambitious, professional and proud, she was hurt by the taunts on the way up and would have loved the irony of being considered retro-cool.”

That retro-cool acceptance of the Carpenters' product was certainly a long time coming. “
It was a transformation
in taste that took twenty years,” wrote Sue Cummings in
Trouble Girls: The
Rolling Stone
Book of Women in Rock
, calling it a “renewed ironic appreciation. [Listeners] had loved the veneer, then hated it, then found it even more compelling, on a second look, for the complexity in the places where the darkness cracked through.”

Also seeing release in 1995 was
If I Were a Carpenter
, a somewhat questionable but highly successful tribute album featuring alternative rock acts including Sonic Youth, Sheryl Crow, and the Cranberries. The collection sparked interest in Carpenters music among yet another generation of listeners, and co-producer David Konjoyan assured the project was honest and in no way done with a tongue-in-cheek approach: “
While it's easy to dismiss
all of this as just more quirky campiness where the mediocrities of the past are celebrated as masterpieces of the present—‘Here's a story of a man named Brady' and all that—there seems to be more to it than that.”

Richard approved of the tribute, even making a guest appearance on Matthew Sweet's interpretation of “Let Me Be the One.” He felt Karen, too, would have appreciated the sentiments backing the project. “
She'd like it
for the same reasons I like it,” he told
HITS
magazine. “The people involved thought enough of our music or her talent to take time out of their schedules to contribute, and that there continues to be, after all these years, so much interest in our music.”

The Carpenters revival wave crested in Japan again in 1996 with the enormous success of
22 Hits of the Carpenters
. The collection included two of the duo's songs that had been featured as opening and closing themes in a popular Japanese teen-oriented television drama called
Miseinen
. Interest in “I Need to Be in Love” and “Top of the World” quickly pushed sales of the album over three million copies. “
In the U.S., alternative
rock and grunge are becoming mainstream, but in Japan, young people really don't want to listen to music that lacks melody,” explained Shun Okano, product manager for the Japanese record label, in a feature for
Billboard
. “They like the Carpenters' pleasant melodies and beautiful harmonies. It sounds like something fresh and new to them.”

Richard's focus moved back to the United States when in 1998 a twenty-song collection entitled
Love Songs
rode the American album chart for six months. This success was enhanced by the airing of the highly acclaimed
Close to You: Remembering the Carpenters
documentary produced for public television (PBS), as well as other television profiles on A&E's
Biography
and VH1's
Behind the Music
. Additionally, Richard released his second solo album,
Richard Carpenter: Pianist, Arranger, Composer, Conductor
. The album sent him back on tour for a series of shows with orchestras in Japan and several in Southern California. Its only single, “Karen's Theme,” received moderate play on easy listening radio stations.

The Carpenters are one of only a few acts that made such an impact on the music scene in the 1970s and do not have a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The museum has a reputation for inducting trendy acts based on the tastes of a select few executives, but even record mogul Mike Curb argues that the Carpenters were certainly catalysts for a musical trend during that decade and deserving of such recognition. “Their body of work was really good pop music with an edge,” he says. “It was very fresh, pop rock and perfectly produced, but always produced with just enough edge. It didn't sound dated. It sounded fresh. When her voice would come on the radio, there was such a presence to those records that said this is not just a pop record, it's pop rock. They were competing with rock artists right and left.”

Whether the duo belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or not, interest in their music has never waned. In 2009 the Carpenters'
40/40 The Best Selection
, a forty-track compilation recognizing the duo's fortieth anniversary, debuted in Japan's Top 5. It was the highest debut ever
for a Carpenters album in that territory and within a month went to #1. “
Karen and Richard are
the seventh American act to top Nielsen/SoundScan's Japanese chart in the past five years,” revealed Paul Grein in his popular “Chart Watch” column online. “They follow Bon Jovi (
Have a Nice Day
and
Lost Highway
), Britney Spears (
Greatest Hits
), Destiny's Child (
#1's
), Linkin Park (
Minutes to Midnight
), Backstreet Boys (
Unbreakable
), and Madonna (
Hard Candy
). . . . Japan is the world's #2 music market, behind only the U.S.”

“W
ERE YOU
angry
about Karen dying and finishing off your career as a superstar?” The question, posed by a reporter working for a 1990
Daily Mirror
feature, surely caught him off guard, but Richard Carpenter paused only for a moment before answering: “Not angry, I'd say disappointed. There's nothing I'd rather be doing than making records with Karen. You know, when she died I actually had people saying that I should find another Carpenter. They said, ‘You own the rights to the name.' I said ‘You've got to be kidding.' Not for a split second would I have done that. There could never be another Karen Carpenter.”

Richard has spent much of the last quarter century as a family man and patron of the arts in his community. On May 19, 1984, with best man Wes Jacobs at his side, he and Mary Elizabeth Rudolph wed in a private ceremony at Downey United Methodist Church. The couple had dated off and on for eight years. “
[Richard] and Mary do not
wish to commercialize their marriage,” wrote Rosina Sullivan, “so there will be no pictures available through the fan club.” On August 17, 1987, they welcomed their first child, a daughter, Kristi Lynn. This was the name chosen years earlier by her aunt Karen, who had hoped to one day have children of her own. The union of Richard and Mary produced four more children: Traci Tatum, born July 25, 1989; Mindi Karen, born July 7, 1992; Colin Paul, born July 20, 1994; and Taylor Mary, born December 5, 1998.

Following a lengthy period of poor health, Harold Carpenter died of heart failure in 1988 on his son's birthday, October 15, at the age of seventy-nine. Agnes Carpenter died November 10, 1996, at Good
Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles after a lengthy illness and complications following triple-bypass heart surgery. She was laid to rest alongside her husband and daughter in the family crypt at Forest Lawn Cypress.

Tom Burris is remarried and resides with his wife and the couple's son in Lincoln, California, where he manages Aberdeen Burris Contractors. No longer at liberty to speak of his relationship with Karen, he declined to be interviewed for this book. “There's an agreement between me and the Carpenters where I don't reveal anything,” he said in 2002. “That is primarily tied to personal information about the Carpenters, their finances, and things like that.”

As construction of a new concert hall began on the campus of California State Long Beach, Richard Carpenter stepped forward with a one-million-dollar pledge. As a result, the 1,074-seat venue was named the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center. It was dedicated during a star-studded gala opening on October 1, 1994, which featured performances by Herb Alpert, Rita Coolidge, and Marilyn McCoo. The Carpenter Exhibit, a permanent display of awards and memorabilia, was added to the Center lobby in 2000, and on May 26, 2000, the university honored Richard with an honorary doctorate after his delivery of the commencement speech.

Richard and Mary remained in Downey until 2000, when they relocated their family to Thousand Oaks, California. They soon gained a reputation as generous supporters of the local arts community after pledging three million dollars to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. In exchange for the contribution, a park in front of the plaza was named the Mary and Richard Carpenter Plaza Park. “
We weren't thinking
about that amount when we had this in mind,” Richard told a local reporter, “but we liked the look of where the name would go.” In 2007 he and Mary were named Ventura County's Philanthropists of the Year.