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Beloved musician Karen Carpenter climbed the ranks alongside her brother, Richard, as the musical duo Carpenters, becoming icons of 70s music before her tragic death in 1983.
A new biography, Lead Sister: The Story of Karen Carpenter, chronicles the later years before Karen’s unexpected death at the age of 32, including her devastating battle with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa.
According to extracts of the new book seen by The Hollywood Reporter, the emaciated Hollywood star spent much of her last year in a $ 6,000-per-month hotel in Manhattan for a six-month-long course of intensive therapy sessions with a psychotherapist.
The professional and the musician recognised at the start that trying to regress decades of compulsive behaviours would take time, as Karen revealed at the start that she was taking “more than 90 Dulcolax at once” to expel any food she had eaten.
She later also allegedly revealed on top of the 90 laxatives she was also taking 10 Synthroid pills every day, a thyroid medication that sped up her metabolism but could also result in heart attacks, convulsions and a coma if she overdosed.
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The Grammy Award winner reportedly claimed that she didn’t need much help because she was “successful like this”, rejecting her course of treatment just slightly.
Eight months later, the Top of the World hitmaker felt her heart was “beating funny” and checked into hospital on the Upper East Side, weighing 77lbs and described as “severely dehydrated”.
The Connecticut-born star also had such extreme damage to her digestive tract that she “had to be fed by intravenous drip”.
The hospital stay saw the singer making leaps and bounds in her recovery, gaining 20lbs in seven weeks thanks to the intravenous nutrition and eventually moved over to eating small meals.
With her health on the mend, Karen “began making plans for the next phase of her life”, which included signing divorce papers, her “statement of independence”, in the hospital, ending her two-year-long marriage to Thomas James Burris.
She continued her recovery outside of the hospital, eventually getting to triple digits in weight and ended her therapy in late 1982, reportedly making the psychotherapist a needlepoint canvas reading: “You win – I gain.”
Two months later, Karen joined her brother and bandmate Richard at a celebration for past Grammy winners and the pair began looking at plans for another tour as she seemed “keen to rebuild her life”.
Tragically, on February 4, 1983, their parents Harold and Agnes found her “unclothed and motionless” lying on the floor of the wardrobe in her childhood home.
Her heart was only beating six times every minute as she entered cardiac arrest, with her cause of death attributed to her anorexia.
