The Ghost of Karen Carpenter_ Cynthia Gibb Shares Set Stories _ The Karen Carpenter Story

I wasn't trying to make up her presence or make it a thing. It actually caught me by surprise, and I don't know if that's what it was, but it sure felt like it. I had one phone conversation with Ed Leffler, who was the former manager of the Carpenters, and he advised me that it was going to be tough sledding, and I might think twice about doing it. But he was gracious and wished me good luck, and I needed it. I didn't have enough of it. But you know what? I also didn't have allegiances, except to the question of why did Karen die? That's how I saw my job, is to kind of solve a mystery, and I didn't, and no one ever will. But the more we know, I think the more compassionate we are about not just Karen and her life, but the people around her and her family. Sixty million albums died of cardiac arrest today in a Downey, California hospital. Karen Carpenter was 32. Paramedics were called in to her parents' home, but she was pronounced dead at the hospital. Ms. Carpenter had anorexia nervosa, in which irrational fear of being overweight leads to compulsive dieting. I think her death, at the time we made the movie, her death was still pretty fresh in everybody's minds, those who knew her and loved her. We filmed as much as possible with authentic people, places, and things. We shot the film in the parents' home in Downey, and Agnes and Harold were in the home when we were there, as was Richard, because Richard was there every moment of the shoot. We shot at A&M in the same recording studio, and Herb Elbert came to meet us and to watch. The day we shot the scene where she's being carried off on the stretcher, right before she dies, I was actually on the stretcher and talking to the guys in between shots and found out that they were in fact the same paramedics who arrived on the scene to carry her away, and if that isn't strange enough, what blew me away was they weren't specifically hired for that reason. When production called the A&T service in Downey, these were the guys that showed up for the job. So that was just one of the many uncanny coincidences that happened during the shoot. I showed up for the first fitting, some warehouse, I don't know where it was, it might have been Downey, to meet the wardrobe team for the first time, and it was a big empty warehouse and there were racks and racks of clothes, and I don't know if I knew beforehand, but I found out that day that they were all Karen's, they had saved her entire wardrobe. Before the fitting started, the team went out to go get something, so I was left alone with the clothes and I started to peruse them, and I was just going through all of them and noticing the performance costumes versus her everyday wear, and I think they were in order of years, I think they were in chronological order, and I was fascinated and kind of horrified by the change in size, how they went from being larger than what I could fit into, and to being so tiny, and I remember just saying, my God, Karen, what did you do to yourself? And it was very odd, there was an energy in the room, that might sound strange, but there was something that happened in the room, and I was alone in there, but I looked up, and I was trying to figure out what I was feeling, and before I could identify it, the team came back in the room, and lots of talking, noise, stuff, just commotion, and the door slammed, and whatever energy there was in the room, it just immediately stopped when everybody else came in, and that was the first of several kind of haunting moments on set. I wasn't trying to make up her presence, or make it a thing, it actually caught me by surprise, and I don't know if that's what it was, but it sure felt like it. I don't have as vivid a memory of feeling her at A&M as I do in that wardrobe room, I swear to you, I don't know, I did not make that up, that was the first time ever in my life that I felt a presence that wasn't actually in a human body, but I recall talking with Mitchell Anderson, who played Richard, about feeling her in there, but it wasn't the way I felt, like where I was trying to figure out what was in the room with me, like I was with the wardrobe, that was very strange. The movie probably fell short in a hundred ways of getting to who Karen was, or even why she died, but it was worth the effort, and I think much was revealed, it will take a long time for the opinions to settle on anything like this. We made a good movie, really talented people in front and behind the cameras, but it's the music that tells the story, and it was just to get a country, a large part of the country by the way, the ratings were like enormous, to spend an hour and forty-nine minutes on a movie, or whatever, listening to Karen, and Richard, but to her voice, because her voice tells the story, the river that ran silent beneath her life and her death is in her song, it's in her voice, it's why nobody can replicate it. When it was lost, it was lost forever, so that's why it has such value, nobody can just come along and do that again, nor Dylan, you don't have to have a great voice to have a memorable voice, but she did. You're never happy with a movie that you end up with, because it's so different from what you went charging off to make, but you learn to accept it the way you learn to accept your kids when they go through their teenage years and they don't turn out the same, but you love them, and I loved the movie. I loved Karen Carpenter.