"I Got Down to 102 Pounds Playing Karen" | Once More: The Karen Carpenter Story Reunion

Indexed: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]People didn't realize she was hiding it, which is also normal, but people didn't realize it was a deadly disorder back then the way you would now, you know, and the family was in denial about getting her help.

[00:00:18]From the moment I got cast, um, I started dieting cuz I knew I was going to wear her clothes. I think I had two weeks. I think I think I was cast approximately two weeks before we started. There were 20some songs that we needed to know backwards forwards you know by wrote everything about them. Lip syncing requires knowing the song as if you sang it yourself not just the lyrics but where every breath is where the VBR is what is the intensity of the tone all of that stuff. So, I started listening non-stop to the music that I knew was going to be in the film. I started dieting, not in a unhealthy way. I basically just ate protein and vegetables for the next 6 weeks. Um, I got down to around 102, 103, maybe 104 lbs cuz I had to wear her clothes. So, the smallest ones were tiny. I mean, just tiny around the waist. Well, everybody definitely recalls that Karen would move her food around the plate and would not eat a lot of the time. But again, my observation, and again, I wasn't dating her toward the very end, but when I was dating her, if if we went to Knuts Berry Farm, she would eat her chicken and her cherry pie. Uh, and I believe she liked American food. I I did not think she had an eating disorder at the time.

[00:01:46]>> One of the things that is kind of a hallmark of people who are struggling with anorexia, especially when you're at your lowest, is you don't want to have to explain to people why you look the way you do. And so you either cover it up or you hide it or you won't let people take photographs of you because you don't want a record of that. Well, there's no secret that Cherry Boone and Karen all seem to have a bit of an eating issue. I don't know whether you'd call it a disorder, but it was easy to see it and hard for me to understand because I love to eat. Uh, but I think the real thing that I learned is that Karen would eat under certain circumstances. I remember one time Karen's mother said, "Did she eat today?" And I said, she ate as much chicken as I did. She ate everything.

[00:02:35]She ate the pie. So, I don't know. I But I do know that she did struggle at the Beverly Hills restaurants, but a lot of that food, you know, she is an American girl and I'm an American guy. We we we like Knutsbury Farm. You know, it was easier. We you never know when you go to a trendy restaurant whether you know sometimes the fish is rolled up in in a ball like this and you eat it and and you have to pretend you like it because you know the owner or you know other people there. But you know Karen and I both liked American food. A lot of people when they talk about Karen's struggles with anorexia kind of see it in the more common framework around femininity and around, you know, wanting to be skinny enough, wanting to be loved, wanting to be adored, or wanting to be a center of attention. Uh, I see it as her efforts to kind of rid her body of some of its feminine signs. In fact, I was less about fear of being overweight and more about wanting to kind of shrink away and not be seen and to not have those markers of her femininity be the focal point.

[00:03:45]>> Well, Karen was always concerned about her hips, you know, and she kept saying every no matter what I do, my hips stay the same size even if I don't eat. And I said, Karen, join the crowd. I mean, for my whole life, when I eat, I can't get rid of my stomach no matter what. I lose, we lose weight where we don't want to lose it. Uh, so she wasn't able to change her hips, but I thought her hips look great. I like a woman with with hips. I mean, I like it when a woman looks like a woman, you know? I thought she looked great. And I just could never understand why as time went on we started seeing the signs that she might have some kind of a eating problem. I never could understand that because she was an very attractive lady and and she looked like a like a woman and that's nice. It very much lines up with the tomboyishness of her youth, of her past, you know, and and the way that she was trying not to be that focal point, that front woman, uh, and or trying to sort out her relationship to that by literally disappearing.

[00:04:55]And then the progression of the disease is that you start feeling very empowered that you can control something as biologically basic as hunger. You know, we have a few basic things that are just primal, you know, but going to the bathroom, feeling hungry and feeding ourselves, falling asleep when we're exhausted. Those things, sneezing, we we don't have control over those things. But the the anorexic does. And it this is where then the the psychology of it starts getting really interesting and insidious and the brain chemistry starts to change because through starvation and this empowerment they become linked. So it's like yeah you have to eat. I don't. You get in pain you get in enough pain and you have to eat. I don't. And that's where the illness becomes deadly.

[00:05:56]And so for Karen, she got a lot of attention that she was looking so great, you know, and I and it was pretty clear through her shape and the weight she lost and and that progression that it just the progression wasn't arrested early enough because people didn't realize she was hiding it, which is also normal, but people didn't realize it was a deadly disorder back then the way you would now, you know, and the family was in denial about getting her help.

[00:06:23]So, it's pretty It's pretty clear when you when you study the disease how she got so sick and then of course she didn't even die from starvation. You know the heart becomes weakened as a result of the starvation, the gaining and the losing of the weight like that, the extreme of it and and then the heart fails.

[00:06:50]Well, when I moved from California with my husband, we moved up to Washington to get help for me. I was trying to learn how to how to eat food and not, you know, be afraid of it. But I definitely wasn't in the market for being observed by people and scolded by people for how thin I was. And I was, I mean, I was 80 82 pounds or something and 5 foot seven.

[00:07:15]I've shrunk a little bit since five kids, but but um so I was sitting out at a picnic table in the yard outside of my in-laws home and they my mother-in-law had fixed a turkey and I was one of those people that always liked to kind of gnaw on the bones and you know pick the eat eat the little you know tidbits even maybe suck some of the marrow out of the bones again before I was a vegetarian but Um, so I'm sitting out there working on I think my dad was putting together a devotional book and Dan and I were working on editing it and putting, you know, some of the thoughts together for the daily devotional book.

[00:07:57]So I'm sitting out there with my Bible and my thesaurus and my, you know, um, various books, resource books with this big turkey carcass in front of me. And I'm sitting, it's a nice day outside, the sun is shining, it's warm. And I'm sitting in a pair of shorts and a short sleeve t-shirt, gnawing what's left on these bones.

[00:08:23]And my husband saw what looked like a pretty scaryl looking picture and grabbed his camera and photographed me in that setting. I didn't know he was taking those pictures. I probably would have been upset with him at the time, but now I'm really glad he did because there wasn't a whole lot of record of what I looked like at the at my worst. And that's a constant reminder to me of not only how thin I was, but how disordered my behavior and my eating and everything else was. So, so those pictures were included in the book because you got to tell the whole story no matter how no matter how vulnerable it makes