I called her K.C., and she called me R.C. It seems as if we did everything together. We loved cars and went bowling and listened to Spike Jones, Nat “King” Cole and Elvis, among many others. More than brother and sister, we were best friends. Karen and I still lived with our parents when we recorded “Close to You,” We’ve Only Just Begun” and quite a few of the subsequent hits. In 1974, we bought a house together and it seemed we couldn’t miss. Yet it wasn’t too long after we hit the peak of success that we were both careening down separate paths of destruction—me on sleeping pills and Karen starving herself. Our career was over long before I thought it would end.
Karen’s death is still a mystery to me. If she had died in a more tangible way—if she had been hit by a car—it would have been equally tragic but something I could comprehend. The eating disorder that killed her, anorexia nervosa, was little understood then and only a little more now.
What would possess a woman like her to starve herself? Some people blame it on career pressures or a need to take more control over her life. I don’t think so. I think she would have suffered from the same problem even if she had been a homemaker. She was not always a slave to her self-image. Sure, she had been concerned about her weight since she was a teenager and had dieted to lose her childhood chubbiness. Karen lost 25 pounds on a water diet when she was 17. Her weight remained stable, and she continued to eat sensibly.
By 1975, it was clear something was seriously wrong with her. We canceled part of our world tour that year because Karen was frail and tiring easily. She spent weeks in bed while my parents and I tried to coax her into eating. That was when we first learned about anorexia. Much has been written about the disorder since Karen’s death. But back then, we had little to go on.
It wasn’t much later that I realized I also was ruining my life through behavior I couldn’t control. I had become addicted to Quaaludes, which I had begun taking to help me sleep after our first European tour. I continued taking the pills at night for several years without any problems, but my body was building up a tolerance to them and I found myself taking more than the prescribed dosage to achieve the desired effect. As a result, the drug would take longer to wear off the following day. My speech would become slurred and my hands would start trembling. I couldn’t write anymore and had trouble performing. One side of me was saying, “You fool. You’re killing yourself, you can’t function, and you’re letting your sister and parents down.” But the other side convinced me I couldn’t get by without those pills.
While I was trying to prevent Karen from withering away, she was trying to help me kick my drug dependency. I tried a couple of detox programs, but even if you get the stuff out of your system, it’s hard to lick the problem. By 1978, I was in trouble, no two ways about it. We were playing at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and I had reached the point where I couldn’t stop slurring until about 5 P.M., and then all I could think about was going back to bed. Each night, all I wanted to do was get off that stage. We canceled halfway through the engagement, sent all the musicians home and left the room dark. I made up some excuse—like I was exhausted or something—and didn’t think twice about it. This is totally unlike me, before and since.
At Christmas that year, Karen and I were going to do a benefit concert for the Carpenters Choral Scholarship Fund at our alma mater, California State University at Long Beach. We were set to play with the school’s symphony and choir. As the day of the show drew closer, I started removing songs from the program because I couldn’t perform them. My hands were shaking too much. I told Karen I was dropping “It’s Christmas Time” because I didn’t think it would go over well. And I told her I was dropping “The Nutcracker” because I didn’t think the university orchestra could cut it. I pared that damn program down to almost nothing because I couldn’t play most of it.
Poor Karen. She was buying all of this, even though she knew I had a problem. I always had excuses for everything. You get pretty devious—the same way anorexics do. But it finally got so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed and I had to say, “Karen, I’ve got a problem here.” So I checked into the chemical-dependency unit at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan. That was in early 1979.
It wasn’t until her brief marriage ended in 1981 that Karen decided she needed help. She moved to New York to start daily sessions with a therapist who specialized in anorexia. But the treatment didn’t take. When she came home around Thanksgiving 1982, she was heavier. But it wasn’t the sign of a cure—she had been fed intravenously. Even with the added weight, she always appeared fatigued.
I remember so clearly the morning she died. She had called me the day before from her condominium. She was going to buy a new VCR and wanted to know what I recommended. Then we talked for a while. I guess she decided later to drive down and spend the night at our folks’ house. My mother called me the next morning and, of course, she was hysterical. She had found Karen unconscious on the closet floor in her room. I remember driving over to the house, hoping against hope that it was just a collapse. I even thought that maybe it would be something serious enough to move her to seek treatment again. I got there just as they were bringing her out of the house on a gurney.
Making a movie about all this has been an emotional roller coaster. I’ve had to stir up a lot of memories—joyous ones as well as painful. But I realized soon after Karen’s death that if I didn’t make the movie, someone else would, and I wanted to make sure it was done as accurately as possible. I also gave long and hard thought to whether Karen would have wanted her story told. I think she would have. She was an honest person and not afraid to show her down side. She might also have seen this as a way to help others suffering from anorexia. And besides, it was in her makeup. I guess this goes for both of us.