You're Wrong About - Karen Carpenter Part 2 with Carolyn Kendrick

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

In this episode, Carolyn and Sarah follow Karen from the height of her fame through her struggle to find independence, her attempts at eating disorder recovery, and finally to her death on February 4, 1983, when she was just 32 years old. Then it's time to sing a song.We extensively discuss eating disorders, disordered eating, and everything that goes with them in this episode. Please listen with care.Additional CW: At 01:21:18 we use a term that evokes suicidal imagery. It is okay to pick back up at 01:21:21.If you want to learn more, try Little Girl Blue by Randy L. Schmidt, our primary source for the information in this episode. Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter - Randy L. Schmidt - Google BooksHere's where to find Carolyn:WebsiteTwitterInstagramSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.carolynkendrick.com/https://twitter.com/carekendrickhttps://www.instagram.com/carolynbkendrick/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Just because we're sober, we don't have to play board games. We don't have to give in to that stereotype. Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are bringing you part two of the Karen Carpenter story which I am telling you along with my wonderful producer and co-host for these episodes, Caroline Kendrick, who you will hear from in a minute. This episode has a gigantic trigger warning attached to it

because we are now talking about Karen Carpenter and her eating disorder and her methods within that eating disorder and just getting into a lot of the details of it and ultimately her death as a result of it. This might not be the right episode for you and if you do choose to proceed, maybe take a nice walk if you can while you listen. We have a bonus episode coming out in the Normal Places Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions with the wonderful Eve Lindley

who will be talking about the wave of Anne Hathaway hate that swept America. If you were there, you remember it's a national issue that I was very happy to get the full story on so we also have that for you this week. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care listening. Take care generally. Here's the episode. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you what Mark McGrath didn't on VH1. You're welcome and with me today is Carolyn Kendrick. Hello. Hello Sarah Marshall. I'm so happy to be back.

Something interesting is happening with this show lately where in the beginning the purpose of You're Wrong About was for me anyway to talk about moral panics and tabloid women because those were really my passions and that was what I spent my time thinking about and the trends that have emerged kind of by accident in the past maybe six months of the show are survival fashion and now pop music and I never and I didn't particularly see it coming. It just kind of happened as what it feels like to me.

Yeah. I don't think it's a coincidence though. We've had a really heavy few years of you know information to digest with the pandemic and then policing and it's been a heavy few years and I don't, it doesn't make sense to me that we're in the mood to sort of pivot a little bit in the things that we use as like distraction. Yeah and so here we go now into Karen Carpenter part two. If you haven't listened to the first part of this episode I bet you expect me to scold you and tell you to go back and listen to it but I

don't care. Have dessert first. Do what you want. Just know that in the previous episode we talked about basically our paths individually to to the Carpenters and their music kind of growing up you know way after they were putting out albums and present kind of in American pop culture and kind of the outside and approach to Karen and now we're going to talk about life for her after the peak of her fame in the mid-70s and a lot of talking about her

battling with her eating disorder and ultimately her death in February of 1983. So Carol and I would love for you to just kind of bring us up to speed with like what happened in the last episode and like not necessarily like a point by point rundown of what we talked about it but like what what comes to mind for you kind of as what stands out from that conversation now. So last time we spoke about Karen and her relationship with her brother Richard

but her and her brother were the founding members of Carpenters not the Carpenters but Carpenters. She and her family are from Connecticut. Her brother is this very prolific piano player. They move with their parents to Downey, right? Downey, California. Which is a suburb of Los Angeles that from what we understand is fairly nondescript at this point in time. They start playing music together after she gets a drum set from her parents but Richard has been practicing

his little heiny off for years and years and years. It's so true. So true and Karen has been maybe a little bit outside of the spotlight within their family. She's younger, she's a woman and eventually they start performing in different iterations of the band. They get their big hit playing college band shows. What's that called? Band stand shows. Your all-american college it's a very hard title to remember. We set it in the first episode so you're

covered. Just search Karen Carpenter drumming like a motherfucker and it'll come up. And then they really kind of get launched into their big iteration of fame in the 70s, mid-70s, after they've had sort of like a not particularly well-received first album and then Herbalpert and the Tijuana Brass gives them a second chance and then they are skyrocketed into the fame that we know them today. And so that's kind of like the text

bullet points of what we went through last time. Some of the themes I think that we started to go through are themes of control, themes of responsibility, responsibility for yourself, responsibility for others, obviously sexism in the industry. And are there any other themes that are coming to mind? Self love is maybe the other one. The idea of self love is something that we all struggle with and how we kind of look to the stories of artists and especially suffering artists and we're struggling to

understand ourselves and we live in a culture that privilege is pretending to be okay over almost any other value. And I think that these struggling stars and especially these struggling glamorous stars become such icons for us, like yeah sometimes for like totally awful reasons, right? Like because Anna Nicole Smith would always make some money for a tabloid so you can just keep hounding her and hounding her until her death. Their glamour allows us to maybe or their talent

allows us to to maybe see ourselves in them and to identify with their struggle in a way that we couldn't otherwise. Which makes me think of when people transform from being human people to iconography. Amy Winehouse. Yes, oh my gosh, perfect example. Yeah, with Karen at the end of our part one, we were learning about different people who were essentially stalking her towards the end, right? And like really, really pressing their own agendas into her

personal life. You know, when you have no privacy, no boundaries around what the public believes they should have access to you, how do you overcome that? I don't know. You know, it's important to point out there's so many things that cultural literacy around has grown so dramatically in like the lifespan of a millennial, which contrary to how creaky I feel is really not that long. And I mean, in connection to what we talked about in the last episode, like stalking was not a crime anywhere in the country until the 90s. You know, like

this was not a thing that there was literacy around. Right, yeah, maybe I knew that because of the DC Sniper episode. It sure does tend to come up on this show. I know we also talked about it in one of the Marcia Clark episodes because she had been involved in prosecuting one of the first stalking cases. Right, okay, maybe that's what it was. But I mean, another thing to add to that list is, you know, cultural comprehension of eating disorders. And first, the realization that they existed, which took place kind of in the late 70s, into the early 80s,

you know, kind of through the 80s, and then I think reaching something like literacy in the 90s, although certainly I think the way I was educated was lacking in many ways, many big, many big damaging ways. But in the early 80s, when Karen is really, really struggling to survive, people understand that eating disorders exist, but they don't really understand why in the sense for Americans and also for her families, like, why isn't she eating? All she has to do is eat. Why isn't she doing it? Yeah, it's such a cognitive dissonance to be told that, I'm sure.

When your whole life you've been told, oh, you probably don't need to eat that much. You shouldn't eat that. You shouldn't eat that. You shouldn't eat that. And then all of a sudden, you get to a point where they're like, well, why aren't you eating? And it's like, wait a second. Like, I mean, it seems so obvious to us why that would be the case. But I don't know. I guess if it's just like a brand new thing that you haven't fully processed or thought about, then yeah, it's kind of like staring into the sun a bit. Yeah. And I mean, I guess to open this way, so it's there's not a sense of like, where's Sarah coming from in all this the whole time,

which I feel would be distracting. I for like a while, since I've kind of come to terms with some stuff have felt weird about stuff I said in the episode that Mike and I did years ago now about big square quotes, the obesity epidemic. Because in that episode, he was like, what's your relationship to your weight? And I was like, I'm good. It's great. Cruisin. Cruisin a lot. Moving on. And I wasn't actually. This just in. Are you surprised? Sarah is the lone woman. I'm the lone woman. Yeah. And like, I cannot express to you like how recently I can't express to you. It was like April, but like how much denial I was capable of being in about the fact that I just didn't really eat anything before 5pm. Basically most

days of my life. Yeah, absolutely. For 15 years. Same. Yeah. I don't know. Like this all my thoughts will kind of come out as we go forward, but we are all holding hands together as we enter into this group therapy session. Welcome. Welcome. Come sit in the circle. So where do we begin? Is there anything that you're feeling curious about? Well, yeah. So I want to know about the inner family dynamics between her and Richard and then also with her and her parents because as we learned in part one, they have like a very strong family unit in a way that I don't totally wrap my brain around. They lived in the same house for many years into Karen's adulthood. And then when she did move out, she was only like a few doors

down, which I guess is normal for most Americans, but not normal for me. So I just want to know a little bit more about what that's like. Something that she does that I really identify with is it's repeated process of like moving out and moving back in and moving in again and moving out again and kind of by degrees. So the first time she and Richard move out is when I think she's 24 and he's 27. So I'm going to read to you about this chapter in their lives from Little Girl Blue, The Life of Karen Carpenter by Randy L. Schmidt, which I have used for a lot of the material in this episode. We're going to go through in a somewhat chronological fashion and which is a great book that I recommend. And I forget if his name came up in the last episode, but the

Carpenters are being managed by a guy named Sherwin Bash, which is, you know, can't make this stuff up name-wise. So Karen and Richard bought a new house for the whole family when they started making money. They still live with their parents and they are very stressed about broaching the issue of wanting to move out with especially their mother. The funny thing about Harold Carpenter is that in this book and in a lot of other sources, he's just kind of like, you just never hear from him. It's unclear based on that how big of a role he had in kind of, I don't know, sort of family life and decision making. It's hard to tell what his opinion was on a lot of what was going on, but I wish we knew more. Yeah, that's interesting. So

Harold the father is maybe he's present in their lives, but he's not like the controlling, deciding factors on what's going on. So it's that leaves me to conclude that their mother was really like a big factor in a lot of their decision making. Yeah. And I mean, gosh, I mean, I feel like the phrase like dominant mother figure or domineering mother is like so overused and like true crime books about serial killers where it's like, well, he had a domineering mother. So, you know, so obviously he went and killed people, you know, and it's become like this kind of boogie man figure and sort of pop psychology. But like, you know, parents often are truly more domineering in their children's lives than they have any right to be. And culture has always supported

that and it does seem like Agnes Carpenter really fits that role. And just I also identify with the thing of just kind of you can know empirically that like your position makes sense. And yet, if you're talking to someone, especially who, who you feel deeply connected to who raised you who you feel overwhelmed by in that way, like you can know you're in the right and it just doesn't matter if they're confident that their, their thing is the truth. Right. Yeah. I guess America and families are similar in that regard where the truth seems less and less tethered to outcome. Yes. Oh my God. Okay. So this is from little girl blue. Sure. When offered Karen and Richard his advice for officially moving out, but instead of confronting their mother and relocating,

the two came up with a way they might evade the issue entirely. They bought their parents a modest 3000 square foot home with four bedrooms and three baths at 83 41 Lubeck street in Downey, less than two miles from newville, which is the house they bought for all of them to live in together. Okay. The expectation was that their mother and father would move into this new house, Bash said. When they explained this to their mother, she absolutely refused to move out of this house. Not only did she refuse to move out, she couldn't understand why they would want to separate and be living in two different houses. And like, what do you do? Like if this if the argument I'm 27 doesn't work, then like what is left? Right. Yeah. I'm curious as to if this plays

into Karen's eventual marriage, because I have some friends who have parents who are maybe along this line of reasoning. And often, you know, saying like, Oh, I'm 27, I'm an adult, I have the right to make my own decisions is like not enough for their parent to like respect. And so but if they say, Well, my husband wants to do this, that is like a way that they can have an out. Not to be too spoilery, but yes, I agree. And like, you know, better than most people that my brain is like, one of those like little quarter toy dispenser things of the little like plastic ball that you open with like a toy or something inside of it, but mine is just like pop culture moments. Oh, yep. And I think a lot about the episode of friends where Rachel's mom played by

that girl, Marlowe Thomas, announces that she's leaving Rachel's dad inspired by Rachel's new found independence because Rachel disrupted like the sort of family marital tradition. And she's and at a certain point, she's like honey, I went straight from my parents house to the sorority house to your father's house, you didn't marry your Barry, I married mine, you know, I'm just the you know, and I would have seen that when I was like 12. And that's so spelled out for me the reality of like, right, like as a woman historically, the traditional path has been to just kind of go from one umbrella to another. And so the plan kind of backfires, but Karen and Richard do move out, they move in together to the house

that they bought for their parents to move into. So what a fiasco. I love that the parents I mean, and on the one hand, I do get being like, no, we've been living here, we don't want to move, but it's just like, whatever, just take the new house. Take the new house. Yes. And I think it's just the basic value system of like as a parent, like you own your child forever, and like Khalil Gibran and many other Instagram accounts I follow know that like, you know, if you bring a person into the world, like you are from that moment to separate entities, you know, you're always growing apart and helping them to grow up and be independent of you. And I realize that's a terrifying thing to say historically, but you know, because the idea of understanding that what

somebody is doing with their life is fundamentally not about you, it's about them. Like that's it's not just that people don't realize that it's that they're actively and aggressively discouraged from ever thinking about it. Yeah, absolutely. That makes me think of some mothers that I know I've heard describe the experience of having a baby as like, once you give birth, it feels like you have an organ outside of your body, which I can totally empathize with. But then, yeah, that that's not you, you are no longer like you're technically you're connected, but you're not the same thing. Yeah. You know, on the one hand, like everything in your being is like a tune toward keeping this person alive, and you are so deeply connected.

And yet also it's like, I guess the ultimate expression of that love and that connection, and like that selfless love that parents are always talking about, is that you let them go, you let them get out of Downey. Right. Yeah, totally. Or like you just are even able to see them as separate from from yourselves, you know, like one thing that comes up a lot for me is, is like parents only being able to see their own experiences through you, you know, like they are only able to be like, Oh, well, I'm scared of this, so therefore you must be I'm scared of, etc. Or like, I want this goal, so therefore you must have this goal, which I'm sure comes up with their career. People have the power that you give them,

and that's not to say that it's easy to take it away. It's like extremely fucking hard. Yes. To stop giving it to them. That's the real the real torture of it all. Yeah. So they move to a new place on their own together for the first time. It's a couple miles away from the other house that they have bought for their parents. So they're living together. People kind of over the years assume that they're married based on kind of, you know, them being two adults who are kind of living so much of their lives together. And people as they would now come up with conspiracy theories about how really they're singing all these love songs to each other. Sure. Yeah. I think is, you know, gross and kind of comes from being obsessed with taboo. But also it's like,

it is kind of weird to make a career singing love songs as siblings. Like there's something about, it's not that they're weird, it's that kind of the broader culture is weird to kind of feel so terrified of sex in a way that manifests and that sort of being what the public responds to so intensely maybe. Yeah. And it feels like an impossible obstacle for them to navigate because, you know, what are they going to do? Sing songs about being siblings? Like that's not exactly like what people want. Nobody needs that. Like it's funny to me that like every song is a love song. Like we don't really talk about that. But and of course, there's exceptions. Like the one I had won horn flying purple people leader, for example, which

although some might argue that it is in some way, but seriously, like it's like it's so everywhere that we don't notice that like how many songs are not about love or at least lust. Yeah, totally. I mean, or there are a lot of songs about work that I can think of. Yeah. Or like disasters or like friendship. But overall, like yes, most songs, most pop songs are love songs because that is one of the most concentrated emotions that we feel in our daily lives. You know, I could I could see how people could feel a little uncanny valley or like the scene in Arrested Development when you know, the afternoon delight situation. Yeah. Where you're like, okay, they don't realize what they're singing. Like maybe this is a little

weird that like, if not sexual innuendo, then, you know, romantic content within this these songs. But but yeah, truly what he, you know, what else are you going to what else are you going to sing about? Yeah. And I mean, and that's what they're great at and whatever. I mean, again, it's like it feels like that's missing the point. But then like, there is weirdness in their relationship when, you know, maybe people are picking up on that, or maybe they're just making up an entirely different thing. But like one of the issues that comes up when they're now living together is that like, Richard gets a girlfriend who basically moves herself in and Karen's like, um, no, we're not living with your girlfriend. She has to move her stuff out and unacceptable. And he has

another girlfriend who is their hairdresser who goes with them on tour, who's like, you know, works for the band. And who Karen also at her, her mother is urging kind of as a tool of her mom, like kind of basically forces out of the relationship. And it's like, you can either work for us or you can keep dating Richard B. You can't do both. And she's like, well, fine, I'm doing neither. Interesting. It feels like there's just this family dynamic where it is like, consider totally normal for everyone to be controlling about each other. Yeah. But I mean, the solution for this is so simple, especially if you have the means that they do at this time. Like if you don't like living with your brother's girlfriend,

get your own fucking house. Like, yeah, like that seems like a much more logical answer to me than, you know, forcing your brother to, to not live with his girlfriend. Right. Right. And then I feel like it is the thing of like, well, if Richard has a girlfriend, and we all live together, then we're not like just living together, the two of us, like as a unit. And like, you know, I can imagine it feeling like that intimacy is disrupted. And like, we were talking just recently about how like sibling dynamics, like, you don't have to be romantically jealous of your sibling having a dating somebody, you can just be like, hey, he's mine. Yes. Yeah. You know, there's just like families that are obsessed with being a family. I, I

definitely am not from one, but I've always noticed that. Totally. I once broke up with somebody because their family kind of gave me the ick when they, they were like, I feel bad because they're such sweet people, but they were like really into board games. And I don't, and it's not that I don't like board games, but it's just that they were like, that was like their way of expressing that they were like a family's family. That's totally what it is. It's like being like a jazz musician's jazz musician. Yes, totally. But I've never told this person this, but yeah, that was what made me break up with them. Which is nice because it's like, it's not about you. It was just a board game culture. It's too much. Yeah. Yeah. Karen is like dating around a bit.

She's really struggling with it. And she says often in interviews, like it's really hard to find someone to date when you're surrounded by a giant entourage and you're in a different, different city every night. And also when like, one of the things she repeats a lot, which just feels like something that we should be able to be past culturally, but I really don't think we are and don't think we were is like, she needs a man who's like independently wealthy because she doesn't want somebody to leech off of her financially or to be attracted to her because of her money because they're both she and Richard are millionaires at this point. Obviously, they can buy an entire house to avoid having a difficult conversation.

You know, that she wants a man who's like able to be, you know, secure enough to be with her basically and who had and she interprets that as needing somebody who's like, I don't know, what the various incel communities. I don't really think it's a community, but whatever. It's the self-defined incel community would call high value. Oh, yeah. I could see it being really hard to find somebody to connect with, you know, when you're, you're not seeing people all that often. And then also if you have like a pretty set and stone idea of what would be a good match for you, because I don't think you would need any of that, but I could see like culturally within the time, you know, it's the seventies where like barely out of second wave feminism, like.

Yeah, we're like in the portion of time where second wave feminism is like kind of taking a nap. Right. Yeah. In my experience, there aren't that many great businessmen, like, and like there aren't that many great rich people that I feel like would be able to connect like with a performer. This is the controversial take of the year for us. Yeah. And it's like, I'm not saying that like, you know, there aren't people of means that have like empathy and the ability to like, you know, extend humanity. But if you're an artist and you like come from like a particular background that is like maybe not super duper rich, and then all of a sudden you're super rich, like you have maybe different values than people who are like, I'm

going to go work on Wall Street and I'm going to like make money. And that's how I will like secure my totally my future. It seems unlikely that she's going to be able to find somebody with the same not that I know a ton of her values right now, but like with like artistic values that also would be able to provide for her financially. Well, not provide for her, but provide for themselves. Totally. Yeah. Or just to not be dependent on her for her to not feel, you know, you know, and then as someone who clearly struggles within security to always wonder, you know, does he love me for me or does he love me for my money? Or does he, you know, does he want, you know, whatever, all the goodies that come with it? And I mean, this is something

I'm realizing inside this conversation, which is why I love doing the show because I realize stuff. But like, if a man or anyone, if he's not secure with you being successful, or you making more money than him or, you know, doing being what he deems to be like, scarily talented or whatever, there's no amount of money or fame or success that will make that okay for him. Like he feels that way because he feels that way. Yeah. They feel that way because they feel that way. It's not just men that do this, but it's kind of a theme though. They do have a longer track record. Dump his ass. Yeah. And just, you know, and the cultural expectation of like, like men get brainwashed to believe that they have to be something no human can be. And that's not fair to them. And

they have to, you know, figure out how to get deprogrammed. And that's harder to do if the world is telling you that like, that's the correct way for you to be. Yeah, it's harder to be deprogrammed if you don't have any, you know, screwdrivers. If you can't open the mainframe. So early 1975, Karen meets Terry Ellis, who founded Chrysalis, the record label in 1969, which I will always associate with Blondie because I remember I had like Blondie CDs when I was 13. And I'm almost positive that they were put out by Chrysalis. I used to like look at all the logos. Oh, that's cool. But this is exciting, right? Because he's a music industry guy. He's like in her world, he has his own kind of realm of power within it. And this is kind of, you know, based on this book,

the most promising relationship that she's been in as far as we know, romantically, he's interviewed for a little girl blue. And one of the things he says is she was very loving and tactile and she loved to be hugged, which I don't know, it just makes me emotional. One of the things Terry does that I love is that he sees Karen perform. He hasn't seen her give a concert or a live show or anything before. And he's like, he says, I watched them perform and my mouth dropped because she was a terrible performer. Oh, she had the slightest idea about how to use a stage. She did everything wrong. She wasn't using her vivacious personality or her wonderful smile. She wasn't using the fact that the audience has absolutely worshiped her. She'd

sing a song and when the guitar player or drummer played a little solo, she'd turn her back on the audience and sort of click her fingers and had no interrelation with the audience. Anybody who goes near stage when they're six years old learns that you never, ever, ever turn your back on an audience. I just simply couldn't believe that they had so-called top class management and nobody had taken her by the hand and said, Karen, let's work on your stage show. Yeah, nobody turns their back unless you're Miles Davis. Wait, when did you do that? So Miles Davis, he did that at the end of his career, like in the 80s, like multiple times. And I think it was considered like an upfront because they thought it was like personal. They're like, well, you never turn

your back on the audience. Maybe, I don't know, like from what I hear, like it was just because he wanted to be able to like cue the other band members better. Yeah, well, and like something I've experienced tiny little bit, I'm indicating like a size of like saffron sized amount. Saffron size. And that you've experienced like a giant sized amount is like the relationship between the performer and the audience. And so this is all happening in 1975 when the carpenters are like riding the peak of their fame, like they've ascended fame mountain. It's all happening. And they're also, you know, as a result of their fame, arguably maintaining a schedule of both recording and touring that is completely unsustainable and, you know, makes them, to some

extent, victims of their own success. They apparently are informed that they have to, they won't make a profit on touring unless they do over 150 shows a year. And like the idea of trying to maintain any kind of personal life or personal growth while just focusing that much energy on touring and performing. It's like, yeah, of course you didn't have time to grow emotionally. You didn't, you were busy. Right. Yeah. Which relates to what we were speaking to last time about the idea of being, you know, a prodigy, prodigy, all of your energy goes into learning the specific skill, but then you don't develop these other arenas of your life that allow you to actually synthesize human experience into making art, you know. And then also deplete

the other personal arenas of your life, obviously. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I mean, this is also especially front of mind because as we're recording this, you and I just spent a couple days at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships watching the junior competition. Yes. Highlight of my life, I would say. Oh my God, highlight of my life. I feel like if I went back to like, tiny Sarah and was like, someday you'll be in the front row for a figure skating national event with your two friends. Yeah. I would say, I'm, wow, I'm going to have two friends. Skating itself is such a weird world. And then seeing like younger skaters within that is, I would love to hear just your thoughts on it because I think it really connects with all of

this. And you're also like coming to this, like pretty fresh, which I feel like always kind of brings up big realizations. Totally. The only experience I have within the figure skating world is the Tony Harding episodes and your article. So my relationship to figure skating is like very brand new. But you know that it is unfair, which is very key. Yes. I do know that it's unfair. And I do know that all of these kids spend in, I mean, some of them are adults, but all of these people are spending enormous amounts of time practicing and putting energy into their craft, which is what Karen and Richard are doing and what Richard is being recognized for, you know, because he's like considered prodigious young early on. And it's

shocking to see the dissonance between the amount of energy and time and sweat and blood and hard work, just all of that. And then to see what the result is, you know, for at least for figure skating, it's like, okay, you put everything into this. And then you're at nationals. And then you're working within this framework where it seems like the USFSA is like not reaching the American public in the way that you would think it would, like there was not that many people there. And there certainly weren't that many spectators, like we were probably the only people who were not like directly related to the competitors. I would guess that there were as many, and this is a very high guess, possibly as many as 40 other people who weren't like support

staff or volunteers are related to the skaters, but like, or, you know, part of coaching, whatever, but like, no, like it was not a spectator event. And like, I must have remarked on this 58 times while we were together. I was just over and over, I said one of two things, I said, either I can't believe we're here. This is amazing. I can't believe we're seeing this in person. People are landing triple jumps, like this incredible, this unbelievable feat of human inventiveness and athleticism like 10 yards away from where we're sitting eating popcorn. And also like, where is everyone? Yeah, where is everyone? I suppose how that connects to the carpenters is that, you know, Richard and Karen, they're pinning all of their energy, they're spending,

I mean, if not 150, at least 200 dates on the road every year, you know, your personal relationships are not able to grow. You still live with your parents on and off, you're putting everything into this. And then it's true, you get to the mountain and the mountain is that you get to express and play your music. But reaching success is not like necessarily connected to feeling fulfilled within your art form. Yeah, which is like such a dirty secret. I think we don't want to believe it. I think we can see it in all these places, but we keep kind of pushing it under the rug. And I thought that I had, you know, while we were watching this competition, and I was just thinking about, you know, because I, the article I published on Tonya

Harding, that was kind of, that was my national's debut as a writer, honestly, came out in January 2014. And that was at the tail end of like a three, four year period of me being like a huge, like figure skating fan and like following, you know, current competitors and like following the sport and like doing so with like a fair amount of difficulty, because it's like hard to watch. And when I was growing up in the nineties, figure skating was just kind of on all the time. I want to say there was less stuff to be on, but like network TV doesn't have anything to put on as it is. If you turn on prime time, it's what it's a singing contest between fifth graders or something. It's not like it's been replaced by something more impressive. They can't air succession

on NBC. So just kind of coming back into, into that after like several years away, it just like reawakened a lot of the things that I had been thinking about when I was following it so closely. And one of the things that I think I was like trying to work out through my fixation with it when I was younger, but didn't quite get to greatness doesn't make you happy. No, it doesn't. And we really want to think that we're like, wouldn't it be great to be great? And it's like, you know, just looking at people who have been inarguably great, like some of them lead happy and fulfilled lives and a lot of them don't. And I don't think the ratio is any different than it is for any of the rest of us mooks, especially when you factor in like, you know,

the difficulties that exposure to, I'm just thinking about the full disclosure. I'm thinking about Nick and Aaron Carter, you know, like, once you correct for like the additional pain that like money and hangers on and power and people trying to use you to get more of it creates than like, and you can imagine that like to have something that great inside of you means that sort of you experience the power of it or that it gives you power as a person. But like, you might just feel like a container for that power. And that feels very true for Karen Carpenter. Yeah. And one of the things that really struck me with going and seeing the figure skating competition is that, you know, it's this art form. So obviously, you know, these people are,

you know, they're competing and they're doing athletic things, but it is so connected to dance and it's so connected to the body and movement and all of these things that we think of as ways that we as humans connect to, you know, the ethereal to connect to God to connect to humanity, all of these bigger, broader things and then even, you know, competition and pushing yourself to the limit of your ability. There's something artistic in that endeavor. But then it's being condensed into this competition where it's like, okay, when art becomes only competition, it's compressed in this weird way in the same way that when I think of Karen and Richard and then anybody or Aaron Carter, like anybody who, you know,

has this desire to be creating art, to be connecting with people, to be connecting with audiences, you have this thing that is larger than life, it's larger than yourself, it's larger than any human, it's larger than the history of humanity, it's like larger than all of us. And then it gets squished and compressed into this modern version of the music industry, which in and of itself is a competition. You have to like mold yourself into this particular way of interfacing that is like, maybe not totally combative, but like it is always going to be rubbing with your original intention. Yeah. And the fact of competition being everywhere is, it feels like it's, it's such an accepted sort of part of life that we often don't even see it.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. And one of the things that just consistently feels very strange is our, our desire as humans to like both make art and then decide like, what is the best art we love having art contests? It sounds so weird. It's really funny. Like when you think about it, the majority of like successful network TV programming, I guess it actually is like figure skating because it's art contests. We love singing contests. Like there are hundreds of kinds of singing contests on TV. That's a great point. That's like one of the great tragedies of you know, living within the system is that like you just often just don't have the time or the space or the energy or whatever to do things that like that you aren't great at. It's this reason

why people get so burnt out on like, oh, I had a hobby and then I monetized my hobby. And then now I'm like tired of my hobby and not me. I would never. Yeah, not us. We don't know what that's like. I don't know. That's one of the reasons that I like love my particular music community, which is very focused in like the bluegrass and old time and you know, older country world because it's very much based on, you know, especially during festival season, during the summers, you know, you go to a festival, you camp with your friends, you sit knee to knee and you play fiddle tunes into the middle of the night. And it's like not about who's the best, it's about how long you can play your fiddle tune. And then the last filler to stop playing becomes the May Queen.

Yes. Yeah. It's so American to not realize or to have a whole culture based on hiding the fact that like it's more fun to share something with people like I think almost all of the time it feels better to share something with people than to be the best at something, you know, to win a contest. Oh, God, yes. I 100% agree. And I know we've kind of like diverted from like the Karen story a little bit, but we're in the, we're, it's a bit, it's an Olympic size swimming pool and we're somewhere in it. But you know, that's why I think, you know, podcasts are thriving right now because there's communities built into podcasts. There's people that, you know, you're able to connect with other people because you've listened to this thing and then you have, it's like, it's

like the modern version of a book club. Not that book clubs don't also exist, but. And it's a book club where you don't have to read the book with your very own eyeballs, which is always the hardest part. Yeah, totally. You have to use your ear balls instead of your eyeballs. Yeah. But anyway, so I'm curious about how this all relates to, you know, Karen being on the road, having this new relationship. Well, and one of the things I was wondering about specifically is like, so Karen's 25 at this point, like, I know. And I think of you as like a very experienced touring musician and like, it's funny how fast you get old when you're doing something that demands everything from you. And I, I'm wondering about your thoughts on that and about what maybe, you know, we're looking at

her now from her like mid 20s, which is when peak fame really sets in to her death, which happens when she's 32, which is young, but I think is old for someone trying to keep up a grueling schedule, especially while also, you know, having a progressively more severe eating disorder. Yeah. I'm really caught on the fact that you said that they needed to play more than 150 dates a year to make money. Because you would think like, okay, these are some of the most famous people in the world. I can imagine they're playing massive stadiums. Why is it that the system has set up that they, I don't get it because then that means that they have, and I'm sure they're doing more than 150. It's like pretty common for acts of that, you know, stature to be doing like 200 dates a

year. You know, that leaves like roughly 150 days off the road, which most of that will be taken up with, you know, appearances and doing interviews and recording or writing new music, which we haven't even gotten into the fact that if they are writing original music or not. But even when they're not doing, when they're not working with original music, they've written, it's still like arranging it, like kind of remaking something, like, you know, expanding a bank commercial into a fully orchestrated pop song. So yeah. And also, I assume that like a lot of those 150 days do not come in a row. No, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. You know, picture it like, okay, you're going to go on a two week tour. You have maybe one or two days off within those 14

day window. Like you spend so much of your time traveling just to get to the gig. And then like once you're actually to the gig, like you play it and then you immediately are like on the road to the next thing. It's not like you're getting to like experience the cities that you're in. It's not like you're getting to get to know the people, the community, the culture. It's like your whole life is totally revolved around like this, you know, this like road band that you have and like the, you know, the roadies and like all the people that are, you know, involved in that. And it's tough. It's really tough. Right. Yeah. And I mean, and it seems like there is like section intense camaraderie, not to say that it's always like super positive and friendly for sure. But

like saying, I mean, it does seem like being an Olympian because like nobody else knows what that's like. Yeah, totally. So, so back to Karen's new boyfriend being like, Karen, this is terrible. What he recollects saying is Karen, I'm sorry to say this, but you were terrible. Now that's the bad news, but the good news is that you're never going to be that terrible again. Oh my God. He says, tomorrow I'm taking you onto the stage and I'm going to teach you some fundamentals. Yeah, there's like, you respond either probably very positively or negatively to your person, your dating saying they're going to teach you fundamentals and yeah, I would not roll with it. No, no. But I do think that this is very, this is constructive and it's really about her kind of

recognizing who she is to people. And so they, they go out on stage and Terry says, you know, you shouldn't stand with your back to the audience. Like during one of your musicians solos, you should look toward the like, walk toward the audience and like interact with them. And in his recollection, she says, what do you mean? He says, go to the front of the stage and reach your hand down. Well, why should I do that? Well, the audience will like it. He says, well, they'll jump up and they'll hold your hand. And she says, no, they won't. Yes, Karen, they will then they will absolutely love it. And then he says, and you're not paying attention to the audience members and the balconies like watch and he's like, watch the edge of the stage,

look up to the people in the balcony and wave at them. And she says, oh, I can't do that. Yes, you can Karen, they'll love it. And what will they do? They'll wave back Karen. And she says, no, they won't. And then of course she does it and like, yeah, the audience does do those things. Yeah. Has she been to a concert before? Yeah, right? Like, she's spending a lot of time with live music. I mean, at least, you know, I guess I don't know if she was like a hobbyist going around seeing other acts perform, but at least in all these like competitions that she and Richard were winning as they were ascending, like you would have to see other people play, you know. It's a very different experience

performing behind an instrument versus just being a singer. Right. And being a singer, it's like much more more vulnerable in the body department because you don't necessarily have anything to do with your hands. It's a lot like being a bottle in the sense that like you have to perform with your, your body and like express in that regard. And when you're drumming, it's like you're drumming. So like your body is covered. Right. Last time we learned that through the late 70s, she was, you know, being presented more as a front woman and like playing drums less and less. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that like she maybe didn't totally know what to do with her body, you know, the same thing. Like when, you know, you take a photo and somebody's

like, let me take a picture of you. And you're like, Oh God, what do I do with my hands? You're like, Yeah, what do they do normally? I have no clue. Totally. I mean, she came out gradually from behind her drums and she always did it like very reluctantly, you know, there's, it seems like she was just like very reluctant to become a front woman. And one of the things that also, you know, turns out to be contributing to this is that she's very self conscious about her hips. This is like the area that she really fixates on when she sees images of herself. And as she's like dieting, you know, more and more severely. And so, you know, I feel like just almost everybody has like certain body parts that whatever, for whatever reason,

like have this magical property for us. Yeah. One of the reasons she likes being behind the drums is that people can't see her hips. Totally makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody has that body part that like if, if I told you what mine was, you'd be like, what? Totally. You would have never thought about it. Probably. I'm sure nobody was thinking about, well, I'm sure maybe some people were commenting about her hips. For sure. But like, you know, but people who don't have it out for, you know, other people's bodies generally, I'm sure would never, never think of them. Right. And one of Karen's very best friends and adulthood friend and Neffler recalls that when she and Karen first met, she felt like Karen was

very unpleasant to her. And then later on when they became friends, Karen was like, I'm sorry. I was like that. I was just so insecure and friend. I was like, why? Yeah. It's hard to imagine that other people have things to be insecure about when we see them as angels in our eyes, you know, but she does figure out kind of how to interact with the crowd. And the crowd really loves her, really wants to be close to her. So 1975 is really when the public starts noticing that Karen is looking very thin. And there are rumors that management has to address. Like there's a rumor that Karen has cancer and no one's being told. Like that's where people's

minds go because basically she started dieting in college and was within the healthy weight range. And then dieted down to the, especially for the time kind of like twiggy adjacent beauty standard, which is like not thinness, but skinniness. Like she dieted down to be a skinny person. And that was where everyone was like, you look great. This is perfect. And she was like, I want to lose another five pounds. Ultimately got down to slightly over half of her original weight when she started with the dieting when she was a teenager. So I mean, if you look at pictures of her late in life, like at a certain point, she suddenly begins to look 20 years older than she is. Yeah. And just to be clear, we're not saying weight specific numbers because we

don't need to. It's not going to help anyone. You know, my understanding is that that's triggering for people. You know, the information is very available. If you're interested, you can go find it. But like to me, the real truth of the matter is that she loses half of herself and sees it as an achievement, which is what she's encouraged to do. When she goes out to eat with people, she'll like make a big show of really enjoying what she's eating. And then because she's enjoying it so much, she has to like offer it to everybody and just like offload it off of her plate and like moves her food around a ton and just, you know, it just becomes increasingly difficult to just like to eat anything in any significant portion. She's very into lemon water.

Yeah. Oh man. In the moments of my inability to eat in a structured fashion, if I miss a meal just because I'm busy or whatever, like if I miss a meal, I get hungry. But then at a certain point, then I get nauseous. And it's like the idea of eating food makes me more nauseous and like nothing sounds good, the hungry area I get. Yeah. Totally. Or sometimes I'm like, literally the only thing that sounds good to me right now is instant grits. Like. Oh my, yeah. Yeah. I realized that last year, I was like, you know, when I can't face eating anything else, I can't eat instant grits. Like no matter what, when your stomach is like half turned into a black hole, it'll still accept instant grits enthusiastically. Yeah. Totally.

Yeah, pro tip if you're feeling that. But I can see that, you know, getting into a you know, a cycle easily. Yeah. Oh yeah, completely, you know, and that you've gotten so much positive reinforcement for it, you know, for years, like people have been and people don't know how to talk to her too, because you know, again, it's the 70s, you know, and her family's response like, and this is a response that comes in, I think, and for the most part, totally out of love is like, Karen, eat something. You don't know what you don't know. Like, cold cure has to like catch up with what we need to know about people we love and how to help them. But also like something that serves us, even when we don't have the information is like to be able to

hear the person that we're trying to help. Like you don't always have to have the answers, but you can always have an open ear and an open, you know, arm for if somebody needs support. Yeah. And yeah, I'm sure there's many things that people are going through right now that we don't have language for yet, that like, there's no possible way for you to know how to like fix their problem. The only thing you can do is just be there for people. And there's like a trend going around on TikTok right now about almond moms. Are you familiar with this? No, I have no, this is the first time in my whole life I'm hearing the phrase almond moms and I'm so happy it's from you. Okay. So basically, the trend of almond moms is, you know, young people

will like show their mom and then or maybe not always show their mom, but they'll like give a tour of an almond moms fridge. And then it's like, you know, a single stick of Oh, I see of, you know, string cheese and then like one apple and there's nothing in the fridge. The idea is like, Oh, I have an almond bomb. If you say like, Oh, I'm hungry, she'll be like, Oh, have have a few almonds. Totally. Yeah, a few almonds is like, you either hear that is just like a meaningless phrase or you're like, Oh my God, yeah, because like Lindy West writes about this, how like the phrase a handful of almonds just like kind of defines diet culture of the past. I don't know, like 1995 to 2015. Yes, absolutely. But a lot of these young people that are

talking about their almond moms, they're of the age that they would have been coming into consciousness around Karen Carpenter era. Just all of this stuff is like, we haven't dealt with any of it. So it's like, it's nice to think that we have like a better understanding of eating disorders now, but like most of the public has like not dealt with these big themes. So we're still we're still dealing with the repercussions of this rhetoric. It's shocking kind of looking at the how we don't recognize, I think, culturally, the pattern of like diet, dieting, destroying people's lives so reliably, if it like doesn't get you down to a weight where you're like visibly incredibly ill, because like, many have argued that Maria Callis's

voice was kind of destroyed by her dieting so intensely. And Zero Mostel died while he was on this intense and very dangerous crash diet. And like people who we just think of as sort of separate from that conversation, but like it, yeah, there's a there's a real path of carnage, which again, if you listen to maintenance phase, you know, all about that. Karen checks into Cedars Sinai for exhaustion, because she's finding herself physically unable to just to keep up with her touring schedule, like it's at the point where, you know, she will, if she's not performing, she will be like lying down flat on her back to conserve energy, I assume, and then will like the second she has to perform will like get up and go out and do it, you know,

she can. So it's like she can do it, but then she just can't like once she's done, she's incapacitated. And Richard's going through something similar, because he was prescribed quailudes to help him sleep. It wasn't told that they had addictive properties, of course, Matt, which was a big thing in the 70s, we're like, we have all these new pharmaceuticals, just have fun. I'm picking up picturing Jennifer Coolidge in the purse party episode of Sex in the City, have fun. Oh, my gosh. Yes. And then like years later, we're like, oh, these are actually like really addictive. Sorry, we should have mentioned. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. He can barely perform. And that's when he I think kind of realizes like, oh, fuck, like this is truly serious, like I can't, I can't

perform anymore. And so he checks himself into rehab. Well, I'm glad that he is seeking help. Later on, he, he thinks that Karen should check herself into some kind of, you know, inpatient rehab for, for her eating disorder. But like that kind of thing is really is in its infancy. Yeah. And also you have to say you have to be able to say to yourself that you have that scale of a problem. Certainly. So Karen moves in with Terry briefly. And then for whatever reason, just is like, no, I don't want to do this anymore. You know, Terry, his read, he says, is that Karen's mother sees him as a threat to the whole, the whole situation, I guess, because the Agnes Carpenter is vocal as time goes by about the fact that like, Karen and Richard need to

keep performing as a unit, which gets back to, you know, the kind of dominant feeling within the family and for people observing them that like, Richard is who this is all about. Karen is there, you know, because he's the genius and he needs her in order to like fully thrive and get his music into the world. And, you know, that like, she's important, but she's important in so many ways because she helps him to do what he needs to do, you know, and it just no one in her family, or at least her mother and brother, like they really don't seem to want her to pursue a solo career. And I think they also or at least Agnes, according to Terry, seems to see him as like someone who's going to interfere with that basically, because he also he has his own label,

he can establish Karen as a solo act, he can take her to England, he can split up the whole thing. So I guess it feels very, you know, this we've all I'm sure all of us have been in some kind of relationship dynamic that makes us feel familiar. Or maybe not, maybe some of you have had really healthy lives. That's good. I'm happy. I'm happy for you. Truly. I mean, coming back to the idea of it was codependence all along. This is such codependent behavior within codependent family structures. There's often like one person that like is the central figure of codependence. And then everybody else sort of has to like mold their lives and their behaviors and their language around whatever this person is needing. And it seems like this is Agnes in this in this particular

situation where Agnes has this idea of what is right and what is like the right thing to be doing. And we need to be together as a unit. And like, I don't know, I just can't imagine what would have happened in her life that led her to think they're like, you know, you're holding your family so tight in your hands that you're crushing them, you know. Yeah. And yet and so many people do it. And I feel like everything everywhere all at once was so successful partly because like so many people have experience with that kind of relationship. And yet it doesn't get depicted that much and certainly not with any depth very often. No, no, someone has decided your identity for you and won't brook any opposition to it. That feels like such a big part of her life. And I think

aside from kind of family interfering and aside from it's it being annoying for your boyfriend to teach you fundamentals, even if you need it. I feel like there's in my experience kind of an existential terror to like coming up, you know, kind of into the orbit of a giant growth experience. It's like, once that ride starts, we can't really get off, you know. So she doesn't get on the ride. She waits for Terry to be out of town and then she packs up her stuff and leaves while he's away and avoids making a scene. Oh, Karen. And it's just because her mom is like Terry's the threat. There's not like tension in the relationship. And her personally, it's it's just career stuff. I mean, you know, I'm sure there's there's tension because there's

always some of some kind pretty much. But yeah, I mean, I think it's like her mom feels the kids need to remain the kids, you know, they need to like stay in this sort of like land before time where they don't grow up and they don't get married and they don't make their own solo efforts and where they like just keep doing exactly what they're doing. And I think that that's you know, and then we can see both Karen and Richard as the mid 70s become the late 70s, like this is kind of just the gruelingness of the schedule taking its toll. And I think also continuing to do something to do the same thing and to kind of artificially avoid growth for so long. I think that takes its toll as well. Oh, man, I am heartbroken on behalf of Karen that she

didn't have the resources or availability to be able to detach from that. Yeah, that makes me really, really sad. It takes a lot of energy and courage and backup like emotional backup from friends and family and, you know, community to be able to make big changes in your life, whether it's leaving a relationship or like changing careers or any of these big things that we need to make decisions upon. And like you need community around you to make those decisions. But if your whole family is structured, your family is your family and you don't have anybody else around to like, I mean, she's got her friend, friend, frienda. She's got frienda. She's got frienda. And like maybe she has other friends that are like helping her along with this too

that I don't know about. But even if you have friends, like it just seems like this family situation is set up in a way for like her to not be able to expand her availability of choices in life. Right. Yeah, totally. It feels good to see her, you know, also get a win for once because after she breaks up with Terry, she moves back in with her parents again. But fairly soon after that, she buys a condo in Sanctuary Towers, which is in the Sanctuary City, which is where Nakatomi Tower is. So that's really great. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Go condos. That's great. And she has a doorbell made where when you ring the bell, it plays the first six notes of we've only just begun, which I think is really nice. So that is really nice. That I just like this little

anecdote. So she has a decorator named John Cattrell. And he says, what do you like? And she says, I want it to look classy in a funky kind of way. I want it to be top notch, top class, yet I want people to feel like they can put their feet up on anything. I don't want it to look stuffy, yet I want it to be beautiful. Karen's friend, Carol, recalled that Karen's bedroom closet was a fine example of her friend's quest for perfectionism. Karen was very, very meticulous, she says. The clothes hangers were all the same in a quarter-inch apart. The pants were all together. The blouses all together. It was like an amazing boutique with everything arranged in order. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me that if you've been in a situation your whole life where

you're fundamentally out of control, you move across the country because of your brother. You're thrust into this career where your family has a ton of control and is siding power over what you're doing. And then you're thrust into the music industry that is deciding how much you're touring and how intensely and all this stuff. You're out of control in so many different ways. It makes sense to me that she is finally putting her energy into being able to control her home and what her home feels like. And then it also makes sense that she's controlling her food intake in that way because when you are totally out of control of your life, what are the things that you have power over? And it's like what goes into your body and

what your house looks like. There's something very exciting about taking the act of home-making and having the theme be like, well, what do I want? And she's also become friends with Olivia Newton-John at this point. And Olivia says, and they had nicknames for each other and Karen called her Ange. Oh, that's nice. Okay, love. Olivia Newton-John said, the whole world was a nickname. It was like she actually had her own language. She'd say, did you talk to the rents? Those were my parents. If you didn't know what she was thinking about, you'd think she was from another country. She'd be fantastic at text messaging. I love that she said that. That's really cute to think about. I like that. I love thinking of, yeah, I just like, wouldn't

it be great if Karen Carpenter was alive and well on Instagram or on TikTok? She would so be on TikTok. She would totally be on TikTok, yeah. She would find teenagers who were dancing to Carpenter's songs and she would compliment them and leave little heart emojis. That's what I think. I bet that she would do what? People who are learning her own drum solos and then watch her. It would be her responding to other people learning her drum solos. Yeah, that's what I believe. I believe it. So in June, 1976, they released their first album that isn't an immediate smash hit. It's people are like, oh, lukewarm on it. Yeah. People feel like they've had enough Carpenders. It could have nothing to do with

the quality, but maybe the presence and the emotiveness that they've been able to muster for all these years, maybe that gets harder. Yeah, I could see that. I could also see there being a cultural shift away from the smoothness that they're after. Totally. Yeah. Well, and also, it's 1976. Disco is taking over the nation, but there is a song on this album called I Need to Be in Love, which Karen says that she finds very true for herself. The first verse of that says, the hardest thing I've ever done is keep believing there's someone in this crazy world for me. The way that people come and go through temporary lives, my chance could come and I might never know. And she says her reaction was, oh my

God, it's so true. Oh, Karen. Yeah, she's at a certain point says in an interview, she really wants to be in love, but hasn't felt it yet. And I think I have a strong response to that. It makes a lot of sense that she's connecting with this song in the sense of like, okay, so much of my life has been, I've just been on this roller coaster of a ride and I'm you know, I'm hanging on the best I can. But like, she's at this point where she's thinking, like, well, what do I want? What can, what does that, what could that look like? How could that come to me? How is that even possible? And not to pivot too much, but I'm curious. The Carpenters are not writing their songs there. Is that true? So they're doing a lot of rearrangement

of covers. They're also working with a musician and songwriter named John Bettis. So Richard Carpenter co writes, four other top 10 hits with Bettis, which are top of the world, goodbye to love yesterday once more and only yesterday. Okay, gotcha. This is also the 70s are also a period of time where the idea of the singer songwriter is new. That kind of comes, comes to play in the 60s really, a little bit in the 50s. But it used to be that there were songwriters who were, you know, working on Tim Pan Alley, and then performers would come and then pick the song or the label would pick the song for the performer to perform. But with, you know, Carol King was, was one of those songwriters who then merged the performing and

the songwriting act. And so that's what became the singer songwriter. I don't know, maybe just think about that the next time that you listen to pop music, because when you're listening to a song that somebody wrote, you get the benefit of like hearing their inner most thoughts. And when you listen to a song that somebody is performing, that means that you're listening to a song that they have chosen that they want you to hear them perform, which is sort of a different turn of the dice. Totally. Yeah. And I feel like there's, you know, an impulse and kind of people who like to disparage pop music that like, it's like a lesser art form to sing a song someone else wrote for you or just, or just song someone else wrote. And I, you know, I think it's just different. It

doesn't have to be less good. Yeah, I agree. So Karen has another boyfriend, a guy whose nickname is Softly. He works for A&M. And one of the higher ups at A&M basically calls in Softly and is like, you got to stop dating Karen. And basically, both of them are kind of tricked into thinking that the other person lost interest. When in fact, it's like they're, they're being like, taken apart by management, like it's a Victorian novel. What the heck? Here's an anecdote for you. Again, I'm reading from Little Girl Blue. With no serious romantic interests in sight, Karen enjoyed a few sporadic dates with musician friend Tom Baller and several entertainers, including Barry Manilow, actor Mark Harmon, and comedian Steve Martin. Wow. Nice. Steve really liked Karen. And of course,

she thought he was an absolute scream, says Evelyn Wallace, who knew her well in these years. 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 these Steve Martin. It wasn't lying before he got in touch with Karen and said, oh, I just got to the studio. So we're going to be recording tonight. Oh my God. 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. What the fuck, Richard? Come on. One of the things that could be going on there that seems

likely is the fear of Karen aligning herself with power outside of the family and being able to assert herself that way. And I think that you don't have to know that that's the end game of how you're reacting. People don't have to have a whole PowerPoint presentation about how they're going to undermine somebody's attempts to be independent in order to do that. You can just do that by acting instinctually in a very unself aware way. It doesn't mean it's better. It just means that the people who make it hard for us to live the lives we need, they're not able to do that because they're smart. Right. It's like the whole thing with serial killers where they're like, they're so cunning because they're geniuses and it's like, what a smart person murder someone.

Yeah. I mean, this is only a hair different from a classic Elwoodsism, but I think this is true and I think many people don't actually realize this. Healthy people don't kill people. They just don't. Yes, exactly. Karen wants to find love. We know this. She wants to get married, but to someone who, you know, meets her criteria and what she feels like she needs to feel safe. And she wants kids. There's a quote from when she's interviewed in 1976. She says, I so much want to start a family. 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. And I believe her that she had a great childhood, but it's interesting to hear that she felt so positively about it, but then had all of this, you know, trouble and adulthood with her family. Yeah. And I mean, and so much of what the kind of late 70s become for both of them is like the struggle to grow up in the public eye and how like both their parents or, you know, at least their mother and their public is like invested in them kind of remaining frozen in time. Like they have a rock and roll guitar solo and a song called Goodbye to Love in 1972 and people

are like freaked out by it. And in an interview, Karen says, it had to be done. We had to shed the goody two shoes image. It was too much. We're normal, healthy people. We believe people should be free to do what they want to do. Richard is 30 and I'm 26. But the letters we got when we said we weren't versions read as though we had committed a crime. People must have been dumbed to have believed that we were that good. Whoa. Can you imagine caring if somebody was a virgin like and well into their, I mean, I can't imagine at any age, but like especially well into their adulthood. No, it's sick. It's because she has to be a virgin so we can sacrifice her in the volcano. The volcano doesn't accept sluts. Yeah. How about this healthy people don't care if you're a virgin?

I love that. Yeah. That's it. That's a shirt. So, you know, I mean, they've had several years in the sun and they are still, you know, extremely popular, but they're not the thing of the moment as much anymore. 1978, 1979, people close to Karen really kind of start trying to talk to her about what's going on. Like it really is becoming, you can't ignore it anymore. So, Karen finds, makes appointments with a few different psychiatrists in the LA areas, but Karen and Frenda, she like they have to go together and Frenda has to stay in the room with her for the entire meeting. And Karen gets very anxious if she's, you know, she has to be alone even momentarily. So, while Richard is in rehab

for Kway Ludes, Karen goes to see him and quoting little girl blue, Karen hesitantly shared her plans to go into the studio to begin recording a solo album. Just two weeks into the six week program, he was in no condition to hear the sort of news and was understandably livid, which is what Randy thinks. I think I guess I understand the levity, but I don't justify it, I guess. Yeah, I don't understand being livid, but that's like that reaction is not about her at all. I think it's about him. Yeah, in a healthy family, you would be excited for a family member to be going out in a new artistic endeavor. It's just so obviously like, Oh, well, if I don't have Karen, then maybe I won't be making, you know, the cultural inroads that I have or like maybe I won't

be as successful without Karen. Maybe, you know, I'm maybe I'm not enough or whatever. And it's like, Richard, you are enough. You just got to, you got to let her go, bud. Yeah, yeah, you do. You got to let her go. And Richard is like, you can't make a solo album, you're too anorexic, you have to get treatment, which is like a good point at the wrong time for the wrong reason. Yeah. Karen is also, she's using laxatives at this time. She also around this time or if not now, then a little bit later is using thyroid medication to control her weight. Right. So she's using these medications, not because not because she's constipated or because she has thyroid issues, she's using it so that she can stay slim. Yeah, specifically to, yeah, to

at least stay the size she is and potentially keep getting smaller. And I mean, and again, this is, you know, we've reached the point where it's very, very hard for her to perform. Yeah, understandably. So she does decide to do a solo album. She's going to work with Phil Ramone, who's a big producer of the period, and becomes really good friends with his wife, who's also named Karen, but whose nickname is Ichy, Ichy Ramone. Oh, I love that. Karen is going to do this album with Phil Ramone and Richard is like, okay, just like, promise me one thing, promise me you won't do a disco album. And then she does do some disco. Good for her. Good for her. Yes. Oh my gosh. You know, she's on her own. She's like finding her

sound. They're working in New York at this point, which is like, you know, she's a continent away from Downey. So they cut this album, they do a photo shoot with her for the album art. The proofs come. And in Little Girl Blue, we read, Karen was amazed by the transformation. She liked sexy and provocative. She was ecstatic when she showed them to Ichy. Ichy, look at these, she said her eyes wide and mouth open in astonishment. Yeah, how do you feel about them? Ichy asked, I look pretty, Karen said in astonishment. I actually look pretty. But case you've always looked pretty, she was assured. Well, I mean, it makes me happy that she sees an image of herself that she feels happy with,

which while she was in California and while she was with the, you know, around her brother and around her family, didn't seem possible. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that now that she's out of their orbit, she's maybe like feeling a little bit more aligned with how she's presenting. You know, I feel like sexiness is about a lot of things, but one of them is like kind of feeling connected to your authentic self. Oh, yes. You know, I think it's hard to like feel sexy if you don't feel like you're expressing who you actually are. Yeah. And independence too. Like I feel very sexy when I'm like doing something that I truly want to be doing, you know? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Right. Cause like the times when I feel sexy or often when I'm like feel super competent or

confident or something like that, you know, like sexually putting air in the tires. But yeah, I mean, like, yeah, like whenever I go, whenever I travel, I often feel very sexy because I'm like, Oh, well, I should like really think about my wardrobe and what I pack. And I'm like, I'm have to make sure I have clean clothes and blah, blah, blah and all of this stuff, or that if I'm just like sitting around at home, like, like today, for example, like the same old, same old, and I'm not like experiencing novelty and I'm not experiencing independence. I'm just experiencing like my everyday kind of, you know, going along. Yeah, like not sort of maybe being as present within yourself because routine kind of,

yeah. And so she, so she feels that way. And it is like, she feels really excited about the album and the team is excited about it. And then it is so hard to hear about what happens next because they, you know, they, they finish the tracks, they've invested, I think a total of like half a million dollars and all this. And so they play it for A&M back in LA and A&M, you know, management is like, we hate it. And then they play it for Richard and he's like, I hate it. And everyone hates it and they shelve it and they don't release it. And it doesn't come out until after she has died. I feel like somebody just slipped my wrists. Like, I, yeah, I feel like blood is draining out of my body right now. It feels like you have struggled so long and for so hard to like take

a step forward and express your authentic self. And you kind of finally do for the first time and everyone's like, this is terrible. Stop doing it. God, I know, I would, I don't know if I would be able to try again. Yeah. Well, and also it's like her health is so precarious too. So it's like, this is, you know, it's not easy even physically to just get back on the horse and do it. Yeah, it's a tall horse. Yeah, many hands, too many hands. So after this happens, Ixi Ramon says she was absolutely destroyed by the rejection. You have to understand she was soul searching. She had always felt inferior. She was trying to grow up and start focusing on herself as an artist, a person, a human and a woman with needs. And it all just went to pieces.

It was like somebody just stepped on her and just erased everything she'd worked for. God, just heartbreaking. Karen heads back to LA and she meets a guy named Tom Burris. And Tom does something very sus, which is that he's like, oh, are you a recording artist? I didn't know. I hadn't heard of the Carpenters and everyone's like, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. Karen believes it, but her friends sure don't. Because he's doing what every girl who has ever watched a DCOM knows to do, because when you meet someone who's like the famous Jack Jackson, you're like, oh, are you famous? I didn't know that. Well, it's interesting because she's been so cautious up to this point about who she decides to be in relationships with. And after

this rejection, it makes sense that maybe her guards down a little bit. But if you were in a DCOM and you go up and you're like, oh, I don't even know. I don't even listen to rock music. Like, sorry, Zac Efron. I like who you are. It's very tween of him. Yes. And Iqchi Ramon says, I liked him at first, sort of, but I didn't really believe him. He was blonde and he was cute, but overly manicured and a little too good to be true. He always had a plastic smile and would never look me in the eye. And so they get married and they have a big wedding. And the only positive thing about that is that Olivia Newton-John is a guest at the wedding and her date is Kenny Ortega. So let's just focus on that for a few moments. Oh, that's perfect Sarah fodder.

It really is. Okay. So then what was his ulterior motive? What Karen ultimately says to him after things deteriorate in a manner of a few months is I'm not a bank because he keeps borrowing money from her in like large lump sums, like tens of thousands of dollars at a time. And in addition to this, before they get married, very soon before they get married, Tom is like, I actually can't have kids, which I know you really want to do because I have had a vasectomy. So sorry. And so Karen calls her mom in tears and is like, I have to call off the wedding. And her mom's like, no, you're not. Oh, okay. But also like vasectomies are reversible. They are. That's too bad. And they dance their first dance to

we've only just begun. Oh man. You know, she feels isolated. They moved to Bel Air. He's, he gives her these expensive gifts, which then it turns out that he's like leased and is behind on payments for. Oh my God. Jesus. So the carpenters put out another album. They do their please, Mr. Postman cover. They're kind of, they're back to doing the thing that they've always done before, essentially. They're back to trying out, continuing to not change. Which always works for everyone. Always. And, and America is really bad. And they have a fight where Tom says he would never have children with her because she's quote a bag of bones. That's a low blow. It's over very quickly. And according to a key, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was absolutely the

worst thing that could ever have happened to her. She was just so loving and wonderful. And then the next thing you know, you're sitting there across the table from your best friend all bruised up. How do you do that? She was pretty much correct. And do you mean like metaphorically banged up or like literally like he was abusing her? It's not clear from what I've read whether this is little literal or not. I mean, I feel like it could the door is open for it to not be literal, but like I'm inclined to say it is literal. Oh, Karen, I'm sorry. If only things had worked out between you and Steve Martin. I know. That's what I want. And then they could be on TikTok together. She finally, you know, kind of returns to trying to get treatment. And so she calls this

famous, not a doctor, kind of falsely represented as a doctor by sort of implication, but a therapist specializing in eating disorders who's kind of famous for it at the time because he's written a book about it that sold very well named Steven Levin Cron. So she's in treatment with them. It's supposed to take a year, but she's like determined to knock it out in four months. Oh my God, that's exactly. I've had family members who have done that where they're like, well, I'm in rehab right now. And, you know, most people do it in 30, but I'm going to do it in seven like come. It's the Andy Bernard approach. Yeah. So she's in treatment there with him. It doesn't appear to be working. You know, they bring in her family for therapy and

especially her mother just like clams up. They're like, you need to tell Karen you love her. And she's like, Karen knows we love her. Classic silent, silent generation being silent. As they're known for. Yeah. And famously. And so she checks into Lenox Hill hospital in New York in September 1982 and gets intravenous feeding there where she does gain weight, but where they, you know, they find doctors kind of identify the toll that all this has taken on her. Her blood potassium level is about half of what it should be at minimum. She's, as I said before, basically half the weight that she was when she started dieting in college. And again, to quote the book, an unexpected complication was discovered later when she complained to the nurse of excruciating

chest pain and x-rays revealed the doctors had accidentally punctured one of her lungs in their attempts to insert the tube. Oh, God. Which is fucking terrifying. That's so scary. Yeah. And while she's in the hospital, she does needle point, which she loves to do big beetle pointer. And watches, I love Lucy. Oh, that's nice. And so she gets up to, you know, a weight that's closer to healthy. She checks out of the hospital, goes back home to LA. And she gives what turns out to be her last public performance at Frenda's two daughters school. I don't know. Very melancholic that her last, her last performance is like connecting with people on like a more human level. Like that makes me happy that she was able to

experience that. And it wasn't to just like a crowd, which obviously she maybe had some, you know, difficulty connecting with crowds. But it doesn't seem like that she had trouble connecting with people one on one or in smaller environments. So I'm glad to hear that. It also strikes me. It's interesting that they're in a band called Carpenters. And what do you do when you're a carpenter? You carve and it's interesting that like they're in a band called Carpenters and she is being whittled away. Yeah, by her life and by the world that she's in and just, I don't know, I really hate how so much of the language around eating disorders kind of especially in the 90s implies like, well, women are just getting confused and taking things too far. And they're so silly.

And if someone tells them that they need to stop doing it, then they'll stop doing it. And it's like, no, this is like, this is it's like addressing the symptoms, but not the the sickness to see it that way, I think. Yeah, absolutely. You know, thinking we keep coming back to the song. We've only just begun. Yeah, this that song in particular seems to have resonated with her enough that she had it as her doorbell. And it strikes me as very to use the word twice melancholic because you know, we've only just begun, I can imagine her feeling that like, okay, I'm in this like her always almost being in the point where she's just begun, you know, she's always almost there. But she has all of these like obstacles and she's been singing about how

we've only just begun for so long. And then her life does not really have the opportunity to really begin an earnest ever. Yeah, God. So just the last couple months of her life, she's back in California, she's finalizing her divorce, fucking Tom is getting a million dollars as his like severance bonus. God damn it. So February 3. She has a conversation with Richard. She's going to get a new VCR quote, he recalled that she yonned a lot during their conversation. She drove to Downey. She and her mom are going to go shopping for a stackable washer dryer unit because she wants one of those for her condo and she wants to shop for it downy because she's has always been very attached to doing stuff there and they don't really find anything they decide that they're

going to do it tomorrow. They have dinner at Bob's big boy. And she has shrimp salad, which is apparently a favorite of hers. They also have it at her wedding. And she goes to sleep in Richard's room, Richard's old room there, which is where she normally sleeps when she stays over at her parents. She watches Magnum PI. She talks to Phil Ramon and talks about her plans to go to New York the next week. Phil says that she talks about listening to their suppressed record. And she says, can I use the F word? And he says she can. She says, well, I think we made a fucking great album. Yeah. She talks to Frenda before bed. They have plans to get their nails done to celebrate her divorce being finalized. That's nice. She sounds really tired and she says to Frenda, I don't know

what it is. I just feel like my chest is tired. Frenda calls Agnes, asks Agnes to check on Karen, which she does. And then the next morning, Karen gets up before her parents does, goes downstairs, turns on the coffee pot, goes back upstairs to get dressed in her closet. And Agnes goes upstairs to look for her a bit later and finds her collapsed. And she's rushed to the hospital and she doesn't make it. And it turns out that since she came back from her hospitalization in New York, she has been using Ipacac to purge, which is what if you grew up before about 10 years ago, this was something that parents had to have in the cabinet in which you're now not supposed to use on anybody because it has very serious health consequences. Is that like you have that like

in case your kid swallows poison or something? Yeah, that's what we used to use it for. Oh, God. Oh, Karen. In an interview that Levin Cron does, which again, he's not a doctor, so I don't know why they're interviewing him, but he's basing this on the LA Coroner's report. But what he says, Ipacac slowly dissolves the heart muscle. If you take it day after day, every dose is taking another little piece of that heart muscle apart. Karen, after fighting bravely for a year in therapy, went home and apparently decided that she wouldn't lose any weight with Ipacac, but that she'd make sure she didn't gain any. I'm sure that she thought this was a harmless thing she was doing, but in 60 days, she had accidentally killed herself.

The news breaks that her family finds out. Her friends find out often by, you know, the morning news because that's the kind of story that goes worldwide instantaneously. And I feel it. I don't know. I have an impulse to kind of do the silver lighting thing and be like, and that really helps shine a light on eating disorders in America. But like, I don't feel that way. I just hate it. It sucks. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely conversation to be had about legacy and, but like with any of these women that you've shown light on, I think the point is not that she was her eating disorder. Like the point is that she was a whole person who was not able to have the control over her life that is necessary to become independent in the ways that you need to,

to be like a healthy adult. We can use this moment to just appreciate her and appreciate the art that she brought into the world and her voice is so impactful, not just her singing voice, but her her musical voice, her artistic voice. And I just want I just want to appreciate her for a moment. We love you, Karen. We do. We love you, Karen. You know, Karen didn't know how much we needed her art. And Karen didn't know how much we needed her to be healthy. And like, I think about people who are struggling right now. And when we're in the middle of difficult times, or if we're struggling with our health, mental or emotional or physical, I just want people who are listening to this episode to know that like, we need you. We just need you. We need you around. You listening

right now. Yeah, yes. We need you. We need you here. You. You listening. You need to stay here with us. And also, just worth noting, if you are in a family, and I bet you are, like, if you have an impulse to say, like, oh, I think that my family member should be doing this, or I think my family member should be doing that, maybe just take a step back and think, who is this for? And why do I think that? And what am I doing to actually, like, ensure that my family members and the people that are close to me have the support and the independence to do the things that they need to do? Your loved ones are going to do things that are annoying and disappointing and incredible. And so we're not the masters of the universe. We are just along for the ride. Yeah, I feel like it's easy to feel, if you grow up

watching tiny little VH1 countdown segments about this kind of thing, that like recovery, even if people don't come out and say it, I feel like it's easy to get the message that recovery is easy, because when you're doing something healthy, you know it's healthy and it feels healthy and it feels good to be healthy. And if you're doing something self-destructive, it feels bad. And in my experience that isn't true. That's such a great point. Right? And like self-discretion feels great weirdly. It feels fantastic to destroy yourself, especially if you don't like yourself. And challenging these structures within yourself like is terrifying, you know, just worth pointing out. It's not easy. Yeah, totally. So that is the story of Karen Carpenter and she sang many songs for you. And I

thought, Caroline, I would suggest to you ending and you can say no, this is a weird idea. But because we really can't get away with playing any music in this because we're not rebels like Todd Haynes, I would like us to just sing together a little bit of sing, which was a big song for the Carpenders shortly after it was a big song on Sesame Street. Okay, I think I got at least the first little part. Okay. All right, I'm gonna cry. I'm gonna cry immediately. We love it. Okay. We love it. One, two, oh, one, two, three, four, sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong, sing of good things, not bad, sing of happy, not sad. Oh, that's so great. And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Caroline Kendrick

for editing this episode. Thank you to Caroline Kendrick for producing this episode. And thank you to Caroline Kendrick for co-hosting this episode with me. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. See you in two weeks.