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118 In the years of its greatest popularity, the brother-sister duo of Richard and Karen Carpenter never lacked disparagers. The Carpenters and their music brought out nearly as much hostility as attraction among American audiences, whether attributable to the glossy sentimentality that listeners often found in their music, to the unnaturally wholesome family values they seemed to present (like the Bradys or the Partridge Family, but in real life, like Donny and Marie), or to their untroubled willingness to play the White House even while the Watergate scandal intensified. But the complicated way in which the Carpenters embodied a politically tinged vision of family harmony is not where audiences since the 1990s have begun their listening. When in more recent years we listen to the Carpenters in order to reflect on their music, the first thing we confront is a martyrology. Let us imitate the irresponsible, somber accents of a celebrity profile as we limn our saint. Karen Carpenter died on February 4, 1983, of heart failure brought on by anorexia nervosa. She had been in serious trouble since the mid1970s at least, when she collapsed onstage at a concert in Las Vegas (during the chirrupy song “Top of the World”). At that point, Carpenter weighed somewhere between eighty and ninety pounds—dreadfully thin for a strongly built woman standing five feet, four inches tall. She had fallen into such reduced circumstances, if we can pardon the phrase, because of a steady round of diets that had begun as early as 1967, including a water diet prescribed by her family doctor. A passing referchapter 5 The Voice of Karen Carpenter The Voice of Karen Carpenter | 119 ence to her in a magazine profile as “Richard’s chubby sister,” plus the inevitable shock of seeing herself in photographs and television broadcasts , brought on additional weight controls in the form of emetics, laxatives, and an endless series of thyroid pills. She died weighing 108 pounds. Although she was still quite thin for her frame, her doctors and family had believed that she was recovering from her eating disorder. Before Karen Carpenter’s death, knowledge about anorexia had mostly been confined to the medical and psychological establishments, but the extensive media coverage of Carpenter’s case led to a dramatic increase in public awareness of eating disorders. Other celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Lynne Redgrave began to acknowledge in print their own difficulties with eating, body image, and control. “Anorexia” became a genuinely commonplace term—not a cliché, but a word that carried the weight of a host of widely shared social fears and desires especially seen as surrounding the vicissitudes of adolescence in girls and young women.1 By the late 1980s, anorexia was yet another illness turned metaphor in American culture, especially as it concerned girls and young women, and Karen Carpenter’s remains were the place where the resonances of the disorder first condensed. Even now, a quick Internet search will reveal ample testaments to the importance of Carpenter’s figure (in every sense) in both public and private attempts to make sense of the internally directed astigmatisms and passions for control that lead to the deadly joys of self-willed starvation. Perhaps the most effective document of Karen Carpenter’s place in the discourse on anorexia—and possibly a significant part of her canonization—came with the director Todd Haynes. His 1987 film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story owed as much to films like Valley of the Dolls and innumerable stories of victimized stars (Marilyn? Judy?) as it did to reverent TV hagiographies of famous entertainers. This point is made clear from the very first lines of the mock-portentous voice-over (the model for the one used in the second paragraph of this chapter) that opens the campy biopic: “What happened? Why, at the age of thirty-two, was this smooth-voiced girl from Downey, California, who led a raucous nation smoothly into the 1970s, found dead in her parents’ home? Let’s go back, back to Southern California . . . [music, dissolve]”2 The film abounds in tabloid muck-raking, especially delighting in unattractive representations of Richard (as a quasi-junkie and potential homosexual) and Mrs. Carpenter (a jovial nightmare of a stage mother). The splendid trashiness of these points alone should have won Haynes’s film the cult status of its models, but Richard Carpenter won a legal battle to have 120 | Chapter 5 the film pulled from distribution because Haynes had used Carpenters recordings without...

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