The death of singer Karen Carpenter in 1983 from complications of an eating disorder remains one of the saddest and most bewildering episodes in pop-music history.
Carpenter had one of the richest, most beautiful voices of her time, and today, nearly six years after her death, she’s still heard on the nation’s easy-listening stations, where her many hits are evergreen standards.
It’s hard to associate that serene sound with the troubled soul behind it. On Feb. 4, 1983, she was so weak and physically ruined that her heart simply stopped beating. Why would a rich, good-looking and phenomenally successful 32-year-old starve herself in a manic quest for thinness? What went wrong?
That’s the question posed by tonight’s CBS movie, The Karen Carpenter Story, a moving film biography of Carpenter that comes up with a number of possible explanations—most of them credible, all of them tragic.
Though the film was produced by Carpenter’s brother, Richard, her creative partner in their immensely popular recording duo, the Carpenters, it seems to pull few punches.
It deals with Richard’s addiction to Quaaludes as well as Karen’s illness, anorexia nervosa, a psychologically motivated form of self-starvation peculiar to young women. It’s also hard on their parents, Agnes and Harold Carpenter, who dominated their lives well into adulthood.
In many ways, the teleplay by Barry Morrow suggests that neither Richard nor Karen were very mature when their music thrust them into the spotlight, leaving them ill-prepared to cope with the stresses of superstardom and the strain of long road tours.
It shows us a childishly insecure Karen, failing at marriage while abusing herself with severe dieting, diuretics, laxatives and endless exercise in what may have been a subconscious attempt to prove herself the master of at least one thing in an overly controlled life: her own body.
Along the way, it also hints that the older brother and younger sister were so psychologically dependent upon each other that they were unable to relate normally to others.
If there’s an arch-villain of the story, it’s probably Agnes Carpenter (Louise Fletcher), an imposing woman who found it almost impossible to show her love to her troubled daughter, even after her illness had been diagnosed and the threat to her life was clear.
The mother also is seen giving her own prescription drugs to Richard to help him sleep and, later, refusing to accept her son’s addiction to the drugs, even after Karen tells her about it.
Mrs. Carpenter dominates her placid husband, Harold (Peter Michael Goetz), and shows the force of her personality in an early scene in which a recording contract is offered to Karen but not to her older brother. She comes close to killing the deal outright but ends up making sure Karen knows she’s only half of a team that she won’t allow to be separated.
The film shows Richard as protective of his sister but not above jealousy. Though it’s clear that Richard’s keen musical sense developed the trademark sound of the Carpenters, it’s also clear Karen was the star. Yet when she hints at going out as a solo [act] while he’s hospitalized, Richard is stunned and hurt. He bullies her out of it, convincing her that she, too, needs rest. She does, but his motives may not be completely unselfish in talking her into it.
After a while, it becomes clear that Karen carried an enormous psychological burden. An apparently sweet, naive and good-natured young woman is transformed into a self-destructive neurotic by her failure to reconcile her inability to find love while being loved by millions.
The film is buttressed by two superb performances in the leading roles. Cynthia Gibb, a graduate of TV’s Fame and one of the most capable young actresses in Hollywood, makes the tortured Karen into a personal triumph. Gibb is a terrific musical performer herself, but mostly lip-syncs Karen’s original recordings in a series of nicely staged musical sequences. Richard is played engagingly by newcomer Mitchell Anderson.
The movie picks up Carpenter’s story in 1963 when the family moved from Connecticut to Downey, in Southern California, partly to be near the entertainment industry, where they hoped that the talented Richard could “become a superstar.”
At 13, Karen makes her debut singing “End of the World” with her brother’s trio and doubling on drums. After Richard’s group wins a Hollywood “battle of the bands,” they get a studio audition, but the label is really interested only in the magnetic vocals by young Karen.
The story carries them through their meteoric rise on the pop charts after a boost from band leader Herb Alpert, who gave them Burt Bacharach’s “Close to You” to record, their first mega-hit.
Later, the film recounts the moment when Richard saw a Crocker Bank commercial on TV at 2 a.m. and was inspired to adapt the tune for the Carpenters. It became “We’ve Only Just Begun,” another million-seller.
Also depicted is Karen’s reluctance to get up and stand in front of the band to sing. Richard and their managers had to conspire to pry her away from her drums and get her out front where she belonged.
Her shyness obviously was a part of Karen’s problem. After reading a [fabricated] review in Billboard that refers to her as Richard’s “chubby sister,” she launches herself on an obsessive weight-loss program.
Through the film, director Joseph Sargent neatly uses the Carpenters’ lyrics to accentuate the psychological climate of Karen’s life.
In one inspired sequence, Sargent offers a montage showing the breakdown of Karen’s marriage while she sings “[This] Masquerade” on the soundtrack with its doubly meaningful lyrics (“We tried to talk it over, but the words got in the way …”).
Though the film strives to avoid pessimism and remain entertaining, it still carries an emotional wallop, particularly in the closing sequence when the family shares a holiday dinner and Karen’s mother tries to make up for lost time with her troubled daughter.
The Karen Carpenter Story is an above-average TV drama about a seemingly normal person who somehow went off the tracks on her way to the top of the world. It reminds us how little we really know about the dark side of the gifted people we admire so much.