With their lush harmonies, the brother-sister duo the Carpenters became one of the biggest musical acts of the 1970s, selling more than 100 million albums with hit songs such as “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” “Yesterday Once More,” and “Please Mr. Postman.” This year marks the 40th anniversary of lead singer Karen Carpenter’s death, at the age of 32, due to complications from anorexia. Ever since, she has been portrayed as a fragile victim, dominated by her family and a ruthless music industry.
For a female artist in the 1970s to be at the top of her game, I knew there had to be more to the story. When I began working on a biography of her, in 2021, I wanted to re-examine her life, legacy, and motivation to be an artist. She was self-effacing about her talent, and this, coupled with the sexism of the time, meant that her words and contributions to the music industry were downplayed, almost buried. As I dug into radio archives and interviewed friends and musicians who had worked with her, a new picture emerged of a pioneering woman with her own agency and vision.
“She was the boss… the one in control of stagecraft and directing the musicians. She was an amazing singer and drummer—real precision work,” recalls D.J.-producer Jeff Dexter, who met Karen in 1974, backstage at the Carpenters’ rehearsal for a London show. Karen’s sense of self as a drummer was a determining part of her identity. She was 13 when her family moved from Connecticut to Downey, California, to further her brother Richard’s musical career. At first she was lost, going from being a straight-A student to having failing grades. Then she found her calling at the front of the school marching band.
“When I took up drums… everybody looked at me funny, but I didn’t really care,” she told a reporter in 1972. At age 15, she was hanging out at Drum City, a drum emporium in Hollywood, and putting up posters of jazz players such as Buddy Rich and Joe Morello on her bedroom wall. In 1968, she and Richard started the Carpenters. Karen was comfortable singing and playing drums, but as the band racked up hits through the 1970s, she was pressured by their record label, A&M, her management, and her brother to forgo the drums for a role as decorative front woman. In order to sell the band and the songs, Karen was de-skilled as an instrumentalist.
“She was the boss.”
“I didn’t start playing just to be a gimmick,” she told the magazine Melody Maker in 1975. “I took a lot of pride knowing how to play my instrument. It hurt me that I had to be up front.” Acutely self-conscious in the limelight, in 1974 she began a rigorous dieting regime that soon turned into an eating disorder.
In talking to people who knew Karen, what surprised me most was how tough and focused she was. Her friend Cherry Boone O’Neill told me that, even when Karen was suffering from chronic anorexia, “she had this way of talking; ‘I’m gonna beat this thing, I know I can do it.’ [Karen] had a public persona of being feminine and frail-looking, but she could talk like a truck driver.”
Richard had problems of his own, an addiction to painkillers that, in 1979, led to a period in rehab. While he was away, Karen decided to record a solo album and went to New York to work with Billy Joel’s producer Phil Ramone. At 29 years old, she was discovering her sense of autonomy as a woman.
Karen “yearned for more control over her art. That was a big part of her motivation,” says Bob James, a renowned jazz-fusion arranger who worked with her on the solo project. She cut a dynamic female soul album at a time when artists such as Linda Ronstadt and Diana Ross were ascending. Despite initial support, A&M executives rejected it, wary of taking a financial risk on Karen’s fresh direction. “She was beginning to free herself, but she was not free. She had one foot in the Carpenters and one foot in the new Karen Carpenter,” says Tom Bahler, an ex-boyfriend. “She was swimming upstream. No … she was swimming up the waterfall.”
Karen did seek therapy in the last year of her life with the psychotherapist Steven Levenkron. But the treatment had come too late. In September 1982, she was admitted to intensive care at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York, with a weight of just 77 pounds. After gaining a little weight, she discharged herself and went back to Los Angeles. She died a few months later, on February 4, 1983, of heart failure.
Karen’s tragic death marked the beginning of greater awareness about eating disorders and mental health. She had to keep her battle a secret from the public, but her friends made me see how Karen explored that sense of terror and isolation in her music. “I’ve listened closely and you can hear the pain,” says songwriter-producer Nicky Chinn. “She put her emotions into it… because she was a girl in pain.” Like the David Lynch neo-noir mystery film Blue Velvet, there was a darkness underlying the glossy surface of Carpenters’ music.
I realize now that Karen’s private struggle is central to her suburban blues. As her friend the harpist Gayle Levant says, “She didn’t just sing the words, she lived them. She told the story.”
Lucy O’Brien’s Lead Sister: The Story of Karen Carpenter is out now from Rowman & Littlefield