Little Girl Blue (31 page)

O
N TOUR
, both Karen and Richard kept to themselves. While the band members were sightseeing in various cities and bowling down
hotel hallways, as they were known to do, the siblings were usually secluded in their own hotel rooms. “They were an odd pair,” recalls frequent opening act Denny Brooks. “I didn't think they felt comfortable in their own skin. I loved the band, but Karen and Richard just weren't the type of folks that I would really hang out with.”

Roadie Michael Lansing, however, found himself quite taken with Karen and made it his mission to make her as comfortable on tour as possible. He brought in carpeting for her dressing room and always made sure her television reception was adequate, even if it meant running wires from the TV set to various metal objects around the space. “I saw her in every kind of conceivable fashion,” Lansing says, “from bra and panties in the dressing room to stage outfits ready to walk on.” He and roadies Jackie Hylen and Dave Connley would retrieve Karen's huge wardrobe case, which she nicknamed Blackula, from her upstairs bedroom at Newville, slide it down the stairs, and load it into the brown Dodge van marked with the gold-lettered “Carpenters” logo. From there they would transport the wardrobe to the Carpenters' Morsound warehouse in Studio City, where it was loaded into one of two semi trucks that followed the group from city to city.

In Karen, Lansing sensed a depth of character he feels many others looked past. “I think she was misunderstood by so many people,” he says. “Karen was much more sensitive than she let on. She really enjoyed just being normal and was so down-to-earth. Talking to Karen was like talking to anybody else. She didn't have airs about her. She was really a fun girl, but I think she wanted to have a lot more fun in life than she did.”

To pass time on tour Karen would work on various needlepoint projects and watch videocassettes of her favorite television programs, such as
I Love Lucy
and
Marcus Welby, M.D.
, while stylist Sandy Holland put her hair in rollers. Unlike many other singers, she spent very little time preparing her voice for concerts. “
I've discussed this
with a lot of singers,” she said in 1978. “They say, ‘How do you prepare for a show?' I say, ‘I get dressed and walk downstairs. What do
you
do?' ‘Oh, I do pushups, and I exercise my tonal thingies.' I'm saying, ‘My Lord, you wear yourself out before you go on!'”

As the Carpenters rescheduled European tour was underway in the fall of 1976, Agnes and Harold Carpenter joined the group in England for the Palladium engagement and enjoyed sightseeing during rehearsals and sound checks. “The mom ran the show,” recalls Denny Brooks. “I mean she ran the whole show. They had management and they had agents, but basically all the big decisions were made by Agnes when she was along. I liked Harold a lot. He enjoyed being along on the road. He was a very charming guy and a hoot to have around. In his distinctive slow drawl he would say, ‘Well, boys, where are we gonna hang the feed bag tonight?' The parents didn't have an itinerary. They just followed the yellow brick road and got on the planes with us and went wherever their kids went.”

Also along on this tour was Richard's eighteen-year-old girlfriend, first cousin Mary Rudolph, daughter of Agnes's sister Bernice. “I'd stayed at their family's house in Baltimore when Mary was just a teenager,” recalls Maria Galeazzi, who lived next door to Mary's older brother and Carpenters roadie Mark Rudolph. “Her brother and I were very close, and from what Mark said, Mary pursued Richard quite a bit. It was like nonstop.” Michael Lansing recalls that Mary joined the group as wardrobe and prop assistant and to the press was known as “Mary Pickford,” an effort to deter attention from the couple's common roots. “We'd all go bowling or to the movies or just hang out. Mary was dating Richard at the time, but nobody said anything. Nobody ever said a word!”

According to friends, Karen was “livid” and “furious” about her brother's relationship with the girl she had only known as their kid cousin. She was especially upset by the amount of time Richard was spending with Mary on tour. “
I never had a boyfriend
on the road,” Karen had told Ray Coleman in 1975, avoiding mention of then boyfriend Terry Ellis. “Not only didn't I agree with it, but I never met anybody I wanted to have on the road. It's the same thing with the guys bringing wives or women on the road. We tend to think when you go out [on tour] you go to work.”

While in England, Karen did her best to distance herself from Richard and Mary and found herself surreptitiously meeting with John
“Softly” Adrian, head of press and promotion at A&M in London. Assigned by the label's regional chief Derek Green, Softly was asked to personally assist the Carpenters for the duration of their London stay. “You'll need to look after Karen when she gets here,” Green told him. The handsome, suave thirty-three-year-old former model, who acquired his nickname after appearing in a television series called
Softly, Softly
, was already a fan of the Carpenters. In what he explains as having been an attempt to familiarize himself with the Carpenters and their show, Softly had flown to Germany prior to the group's arrival in London. “We always did that with our artists,” Softly recalls. “You couldn't be working with them and not know who they were.”

“Why are you sitting there all alone and being so snobby?” Karen's flirtatious handwritten note became an invitation for Softly to join her for breakfast at the Albany Hotel in Glasgow. He smiled from across the room before joining her and recalls being surprised by Karen's normality. Captivated by her sweet disposition, he made a silent vow that the two would become romantically involved. “The attraction was instant, and I would like to think it was mutual,” he says, “but we were kind of shy of each other a bit, to be honest.”

Softly soon realized it would be more difficult to infiltrate the Carpenters' circle than he imagined. “She was always surrounded by people—family managers and record executives,” he recalls. “She had several moats, and you were going to have to cross them to get anywhere near her. She was like a little girl to me, really. A little girl who happened to have an extraordinary voice. Karen was very kind and very sweet, but she lived in a glass bowl. She had sixty-five people telling her what to do and fifty-seven hangers-on and managers and submanagers, and it was like a bloody fiasco.”

Softly admits his position with the record label was his only way past the moats. “I had to pick her up at the hotel and take her to interviews and look after her, so I was very close to her during that time. You get to know people rather quickly when you're working that closely with them, and I think she trusted me to take care of her.” As he had hoped, a brief interlude of puppy love ensued, and he and Karen began to see more of one another as time allowed. “It was one of those short, very
enjoyable, very lovely romances,” he says. “Hardly anybody knew about it, really. It was very sweet. That's all, really. It was just very sweet.”

Despite their affection for each other, concealing their feelings was imperative. No one would have approved of a relationship between a Carpenter and an A&M staff member. Despite their precautions, word of Karen's involvement with Softly ultimately reached A&M executives and the Carpenters' management. Frenda Leffler was along for this leg of the tour and became concerned about the intentions of this man who seemed to have showed up out of nowhere. “What would you do with all that money?” she asked him.

“I'm doing just fine without it now, actually,” he responded. “I could care less about her money.”

Despite Softly's claims of truly loving Karen, Frenda and others in the entourage saw him as a bit of a playboy and did not take him seriously. It was not until Karen invited him to join her in Los Angeles for Christmas that everyone became disturbed. In their opinions she was simply infatuated and not thinking this through. “It was a momentary thing, and Karen didn't really see the reality of it,” Frenda recalls. “He showed her a lot of attention, and he was a cute guy, but it just wasn't right for her. He was put out of commission rather quickly. The powers that be jumped on it, and Karen didn't have anything to say about it.”

Back at A&M headquarters in London, Derek Green was alerted of the budding romance between Karen and his employee. Softly's character and intentions were being scrutinized, but Green assured those who questioned his character that he was indeed a fine man and anything but a gigolo. But after much urging, Green called Softly into his office, where he explained that if he were to go through with his plans to visit Karen in Los Angeles, he would no longer have a job at A&M. With the offer of plane tickets for a Caribbean vacation, Softly was told to go away, relax, and forget all about the fantasy of ever being with Karen Carpenter. “Basically our relationship was sabotaged by many of the people surrounding us,” Softly says. “It was nipped in the bud, and I was threatened with my job. I went off to the Caribbean and got married after three months. It was what you might call a rebound.”

At the time, Softly figured this was most likely some sort of scheme by Karen to secretly end their impending relationship. It seemed too good to be true anyway. His pride was hurt, and he quietly disappeared from the final leg of the tour. When Karen learned he had left the tour for a tropical vacation, she was sure he had run off with some other woman. In the end, both were persuaded to believe that the other had lost interest, and the relationship came to an end. “They were a controlling bunch,” Softly says of A&M and the Carpenters in general. “She was the golden goose, and people protected her. They didn't want anybody, particularly an outsider she might be fond of, to take her away from the family. I think it was that people got scared that I might become her manager or something, which was totally ridiculous. I was not qualified to do that anyway.”

Upon her return to Los Angeles, Karen sent a handwritten greeting card to Softly saying, “Thanks for looking after me.” He doubts she ever learned how their relationship had been disrupted. In fact, the two never spoke of the fling again. Softly was only told of the conspiracy some fifteen years later when Derek Green broke his silence. Softly was upset to learn of the control Karen seemed to have been subjected to all those years ago. “She was a sad little girl, basically. She couldn't seem to do anything for herself or make any decisions. Everything was done for her. She had her mom and dad and brother and managers, and she was lost in this whole thing.”

W
ITH NO
serious romantic interests in sight, Karen enjoyed a few sporadic dates with musician friend Tom Bähler and several entertainers including Barry Manilow, actor Mark Harmon, and comedian Steve Martin. “Steve really liked Karen, and of course she thought he was an absolute scream,” says Evelyn Wallace. “They were going out, and Karen had picked out what she was going to wear. Then word got around to Richard that Karen was going to go out that night with
the
Steve Martin. It wasn't long before he got in touch with Karen and said, ‘Oh, I just got the studio, so we're going to be recording tonight.' Knowing that Karen had a date, he somehow all of a sudden got the
studio and they were going to go up and record. See, even when she was on her own and living in the condo, Richard had a string on her. She was never ever her own boss.”

Like the celebrities she dated casually, Karen found it extremely difficult in her situation not only to meet people but to find somebody “real,” as she would often say. “
I want desperately to
find the right man,” she said in 1976, “but it really has to be someone who is understanding and extremely strong. The average guy could never live under the pressure and all the other absurdities that go along with being in the limelight. You can't force these things. When you do, it always turns into a nightmare. I know a lot of people who have, and they always ended up the loser. I'll go on doing what I'm doing, and if I meet someone who turns me on, we'll go from there. . . . I'm not afraid of being an old maid. The idea doesn't scare me a bit. Happiness shouldn't be contingent on another human being. We've been programmed for so long that your value goes down if you don't end up with a husband or a wife. That's a sickness that has sprouted many unhappy people.”

As former manager Sherwin Bash explained, it's extremely difficult for a successful female artist to find a man who can deal with her celebrity status. “
I don't know anyone
who wants to be Mr. Diana Ross,” he said. “Do you want to be Mr. Barbra Streisand? I don't think our male egos work that way, so to find that person is not that easy.”

Karen shared with friends her desire for life as a wife and mother. “
You see, I so much
want to start a family,” she told an interviewer in 1976. “I really want kids. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I could not have children without first being married. I believe in the institution of marriage very strongly. I'm family oriented and I'm proud of it. I had a happy childhood, and I would like to do the kind of job my parents did.”