Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read online

  Edd was not only a really wonderful director but a great teacher as well. He taught me so much. I had very strong ideas about what I thought the video should look like and mainly I was trying to make sure that it moved along with the music. And you don’t shoot a dance scene without showing the feet! I saw that all the time. I asked Edd so many questions during our meetings. “What’s the apartment going to look like? What’s she going to look like? What’s her room going to look like? Because it’s gotta have a certain look.”

  The aesthetic I was going for was again Screaming Mimi’s. And of course Laura Wills, the owner, was styling my clothes for the shoot. That store totally inspired me. I shopped all around the city and always went back to Screaming Mimi’s because it had this fun approach to fashion. It had humor, it had wildness, it had sexiness, it had the old-movie vibe. And I had always felt like I was born in an old movie. To me, the whole Screaming Mimi’s look wasn’t just a style—it was a movement. And it wasn’t just them. There were a whole bunch of people in the city who saw fashion, and home living, like that—reminiscent of the fifties, yet a Jackson Pollock thing, and that modern, cutting-edge thing where you mix elements together that would never have been mixed together in that time. When we did this video, the style that we presented was current but still underground. That look was really hot in New York and in England, but it was not big in middle America.

  I started working with the art director—the guy who was doing the furniture and stuff. I wanted the kitchen to be very fifties. We couldn’t really afford wallpaper—it was really a low-budget shoot—so I brought in a tablecloth from Screaming Mimi’s that had a pattern I liked, and the art director kind of painted the walls like that. I also found furniture for the bedroom and painted it with bright paint. I wish I could find that furniture now. I think it’s in storage.

  I really saw my work as a kind of social movement, and not just when it came to the visuals. When I asked my mom to be in the video, I said, “Mom, think of what this could mean if you’re involved—then you and I will make it popular to be friends with your mom.” I told her we couldn’t afford to pay a bunch of extras, and she said, “Of course I’ll help you, Cyndi. What do you want me to do? I’m not really an actress.” I said, “Ma, we’re gonna play together, that’s all.” So Laura dressed her up, and they fixed her hair up, put a little makeup on her. On the set, she sat at the kitchen table and she didn’t know what to do. Edd said, “Maybe when you’re at the table cracking eggs, you should take the egg and slap it on your chest, like you’re doing a mea culpa.” So after I come in and sing, “We’re not the fortunate ones,” she takes the egg and breaks it on her chest like Edd said and then realizes it’s there. That’s all she needed to do.

  My mother was frightened to death of Captain Lou. When he was talking to her during the shoot, he was really getting in her face, and you could see her sort of backed up against the wall, but it was so funny. My mom is such a good sport. She even came to work at the age of eighty on The Celebrity Apprentice. There was something about her on film that was so vulnerable. She wasn’t an actress, but she had this charming presence that was so endearing. I know this is my mother, but she looked like she was from an Italian film, or the woman from the 1950s French film Mon Oncle.

  We shot it in the summer at a place called Mother’s, a studio in the East Village. Again, we didn’t have a big budget so we all opened up our closets and shared all our clothes, and we got a whole bunch of my friends and family to be in the video. They’re all in it except my sister, Elen, who was in LA, and my cousin Vinny. Everyone’s generosity is what got the video made. We were all in this together. My videos became almost like home movies of my friends and family. I remember we got all the beauticians from Vidal Sassoon to be in it, too. Not Vidal himself, but everybody else joined in, including this really talented guy named Justin Ware, who did my hair for the shoot. I knew everybody at Vidal Sassoon because I was a hair model there for the longest time. In 1975 or ’76, it was the cutting-edge place, and they would do demonstrations on my hair. Everyone was doing all kinds of wild and creative things at that time and had absolutely amazing hair. You’d come in and somebody had hair dyed like a tabby cat, and you’d say, “Man, that’s fuckin’ awesome—how did they do that?” The hairstyles were art pieces. As you could imagine, there was a lot of experimentation done on my hair. In the seventies I had a Suzi Quatro kind of haircut, and it was brown, and then they went with red in the back and blond in the front. I loved it.

  They looked forward to rock and rollers like me who wanted experimental haircuts. They’d discuss it with you and say, “How about we dye it black just on the last few inches?” and you’d go, “Yeah, yeah, that’s good.” I once told Justin to cut my hair short on one side and gradually long on the other, because there was a picture of Mamie Van Doren on the wall at Screaming Mimi’s, with her hair pinned to one side. I thought, “Why pin it when you can just cut it?”

  So we had the beauticians from Vidal Sassoon, some secretaries from Epic, the girls from Laura’s shop, Myra from the Japanese place where I had worked, and this black girl we cast who looked awesome with her dreads. It was very important to me that every girl was represented—Hispanic girls, African-American girls. I told Edd that we had to have multiracial people too. At that time, everybody who was in videos was either all white or all black. I figured, “You know what? Here’s what I see missing. Let’s go for it.” There still wasn’t as much integration as there should have been, but I feel like a lot of little girls who saw the video saw themselves, and that was the most important thing. As long as I got to them, I didn’t care anymore.

  So many people showed up for that shoot! It was extraordinary. My brother, Butch, played the pizza-delivery guy. Joe Zynsczak, who was my manager along with Dave, was the waiter in the bedroom. I had a friend named Bonnie Ross who was a nurse, and she was there dressed up in her uniform. (Bonnie was a direct descendant of Betsy Ross and used to tell me there was this horrible feeling in her family that Betsy might have slept with George Washington to get the gig.) You know the man with the handlebar mustache? That was my lawyer, Elliot Hoffman. Edd said, “How about getting Steve Forbert to be your boyfriend?” I said, “I love Steve Forbert.” So there’s Steve Forbert holding flowers. They’re all in that fuckin’ room.

  The shoot took place over one long day that turned into a party. We got up really early for our first shot at the Metropolitan Museum. We stood in front of the fountain because it was supposed to look like a Busby Berkeley production. So all of us were lined up, Francis the cameraman used a Steadicam that he owned, and I took all my sunglasses that I had gotten at Screaming Mimi’s over the years and handed them out, so everybody put on a pair. So that’s the shot. And I was happy because everyone looked young and kind of hip. I brought all my makeup to the shoot, too, and ended up getting pinkeye because all of us shared everything.

  Even my dog is in the beginning of the video—Rick Chertoff is walking him as I’m dancing down the street. For that part, I was inspired by a scene in this Sophia Loren movie where she comes dancing down the street in Naples in the fuckin’ early morning light with her shoes slung over her shoulder. Then I had to go find the right street. I went down to the West Village, where there would be cobblestone streets, like in the movie, and I found this one street that had a great depth of field because it curved around. It’s called Gay Street, oddly enough.

  And then, for a scene later in the video, Edd told me to lead everyone down the street. I said, “What am I supposed to do, the can-can?” (Funny, I kind of did do a can-can.) It was me and this kind of motley crew. I mean, the girls were pretty, but it was still motley even though we took a glamorous approach to the whole thing. You had all these radical girls behaving like they’re America’s sweethearts in the Ziegfeld Follies. Edd said, “Keep leading everyone through the city until you get home, and then your poor mother has to deal with all these people traipsing through to get to your room.” It would be lik
e the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera, where everybody keeps coming into the room, until Captain Lou opens the door and they all fall out—which I think was Dave Wolff’s idea. Or was it Edd’s? Or it might have been Dave’s friend Johann, who was also in the video. Dave had his own language and he called his friend Johann Von Bep Bep. His first name was really Johann, but I have no idea what his real last name was.

  After we finished shooting, Edd was kind enough to allow me to be a part of the editing, which I really wanted to do. So he showed me the first edit and I said, “Wait a minute—where’s all the other shots? They’re not in here.” He told me that the editor, Pam, had cut some scenes, but if I wanted to add or change things, I should go in with her and get them. I have a good visual memory (especially with clothes) and I busted my ass to do certain things. So I was literally sitting with Pam and pulling out strips of film from a bin. I changed a few shots around with her, and all of a sudden it was moving better and Edd said, “I think you should stay in here with her.” So all of a sudden, I was learning editing. I only did it because I wanted my video to move the way it should move, because it was about music—and I know music.

  Edd was looking to get in some kind of special effect, so at the special effects studio at Broadway Video they showed me a technique where you take a photograph and kind of wrap it in a ball. I was under the impression that each girl would be in her own ball—again, kind of a Busby Berkeley effect. But that was not the effect—we only had a certain amount of money, so they were going to do dots of random shots. So I said, “What the hell can this ball do? Can it bounce? How much does that cost?” He said it would cost the same, so then he bounced it and I said, “Bounce it to the time of the music.”

  We didn’t have the budget to really do the kind of thing that Busby Berkeley would do—we would have had to have a crane over us to film from above while we all lay down on the floor and moved the way they did in those musicals. Which is what Macy Gray did in her video for “Beauty in the World”—they were all in a circle holding up pink circles and she’s in the middle. That’s a very strong visual. But you also have to figure out that kind of thing in advance, and we were kind of in a rush.

  I did love the part in the video when the silent-movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is playing and I’m singing, “Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away . . . ,” and of course it’s Quasimodo, taking Esmeralda away to the tower at the exact same time, which is very funny. And the way it was edited, it looked like Quasimodo was waving his arm to the beat and singing the song, too, which was even funnier.

  There were so many bits and pieces in there of different things that influenced me. When I pick up the phone backward and then turn it around, it’s because I had seen a David Bowie piece somewhere, where he had a phone receiver upside down and then put it right-side up. I thought, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” And I love the French filmmaker Jacques Tati (if you don’t know about him you should rent Mon Oncle or Mr. Hulot’s Holiday), so there are elements of his style in there as well. I used to watch channel 13 a lot, the public TV station in New York, because I loved old films and they showed a lot of them, like Mon Oncle. And because I was an art student, I knew about studying the masters. You need to know what was, before you know what can be.

  People think “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was a big hit right away, but it wasn’t. MTV played it a little at first, but not much. When it went to radio, it only got seven adds in two weeks, meaning only seven radio stations played it in the whole country. I got a letter from a powerful national radio programmer who said that the record would never be big because I sang too high. He offered to have me and Dave come see him so we could discuss my career options. But Dave looked at the letter and decided to cook up a different idea. He said, “This is what we’re going to do: We’re going to start to go to wrestling shows. I’m going to call this guy Vince McMahon and propose a cross-promotion, and we’ll start by doing stuff with Captain Lou.” And that’s how my record really broke.

  It was Dave’s dream to do something like this. I mean, this was the guy who set up press meetings in that ridiculous way when he did the whole Human Fly thing, using a horrible French-Canadian accent. Dave really was a pioneer of cross-promotion. Here’s how he explained it to me: There were three wrestling shows every weekend, Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday night. If you had your music videos on all three of those shows, which had big numbers, lots of people would see them. So I said okay.

  So then publicity photos started coming out of me and Dave at wrestling matches cheering on the wrestlers and booing the bad guys. And they showed parts of my video before commercial breaks. But he also thought up these on-air scenarios with Captain Lou and me that were played during the show.

  You know how those sixties beach movies had all these ridiculous comical characters—like in the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello teen movies where there was a biker named Eric Von Zipper? And the straight people in the movie would be in there going, “Who the heck are these people?” Well, those comical characters were very influential in everything I did. So along with Captain Lou and the wrestlers, I had my mother become a character and dressed her up like this eccentric, sexy, kooky woman with pointy sunglasses and a Chinese robe, and a long cigarette holder and foo-foo shoes with cha-cha heels and pedal pushers.

  I thought we should start doing stuff like that because it was funny, and because every time you saw artists, they would try and tell you about their work and their music and basically it can be boring as shit. Just like when I sit there and try and explain my work—it’s probably so fucking boring. What’s important is the end result: Is it entertaining? So I thought, how hilarious would it be if my “spiritual adviser” Captain Lou, as this big fuckin’ nut, just talks you senseless?

  So when I did promotion I’d have my “spiritual adviser” standing there, with two giant Samoan guys standing behind him. And he’d launch into the P-E-G principle: Politeness, Etiquette, and Good Grooming, which is something that he, as a manager, had taught these two men. It mimicked a scene that was very familiar in old-school wresting promotion—there’s some screaming nut-job manager type with a big stupid guy nodding his head in the background. We used to think, “This is brilliant and very on spot.” It was improv, too, baby!

  And then things started to pick up with the album. I remember I got on David Letterman’s show right away. At the time, he was new, and he was on at 12:30 A.M. And I was new, too, and I was funny—that’s all the people booking the show knew. At that point, Dave would play a little clip from your video and then he’d let you talk. So when I came on, I decided to pick my foot up and put it on the chair in a certain way that was irreverent and comfortable.

  I really wasn’t nervous. I was ready. Dave was so funny when he started talking to me, so I had fun with him. He asked about my mom, and I told him that we used to have some pet fish, and one of them got fungus and had a tumor, so my mother decided to operate on it. She got out a cuticle scissor and sterilized it and everything. Then she laid the fish out, kept it wet, and cut away the tumor, then painted mercurochrome on it and put it back in the tank.

  And the fish lived. Dave said, “So your mom is a fish doctor.” Yes, I said. Unfortunately what happened was our fish were Siamese fighter fish, so when my mother put the female fish back in the tank with the others, a male fish killed her. My mother was so upset, she took the male fish out with the net and put him down and said, “Bad fish, bad fish!” and smacked him a little with the net. Unfortunately, that chopped his tail off. Then she tried to put him back in the water because she didn’t want him to die. It was all a terrible thing, but you can’t take a fish out of the tank and spank him. The story got so crazy and then Paul Shaffer started chiming in . . . it was pretty funny.

  So Letterman was the first adventure, and then the record company realized that they had something. Until I came along, they never understood how to put together fashion (well, my version of it
) and humor with music. Music had become a visual medium, so Dave Wolff and I created this whole world that we brought with us when we did appearances or press, which is much more intriguing and interesting, if you ask me. My mother became a regular character in my entourage, and she made up a stage name for herself: Catrine Dominique. Like I said, she liked everything French.

  And then there was always Captain Lou, who would go ranting about something, and then I’d chime in, and it would get silly. Captain Lou became famous all over the world because he was in videos like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “She Bop,” and “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.” We were walking a little bit of a fine line between earning respect and not being taken seriously, but it was still really fun. I’d think, “Who cares if they think I’m a good singer or not? I am a good singer.” When I sang “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and came back with “Time After Time,” that’s when I proved that you can rock out, be a good singer and writer, but also use humor.

  Then Dave Wolff made a deal with Vince McMahon that if he continued to play my videos on his shows, I would go on Johnny Carson and promote wrestling. So that’s what we did. And you know what? It worked. Johnny Carson was huge for me. Although he always called me Sydney and never Cyndi. But hey, it was Johnny Carson, and that was his pet name for me, which was kind of cool. When I first went on his show, I wore the sparkly, full skirt I wore in the “Time After Time” video and this wonderful rust-and-yellow Hawaiian-print shirt that I loved (I still have it), and I tied tulle around my head in a bow. I saw that tulle on a mannequin named Esther at Screaming Mimi’s first. My friend Biff Chandler, who was Laura’s partner at Screaming Mimi’s, came up with that idea. (Sadly, he died of AIDS in the nineties. At that time, we were losing a lot of visionaries to AIDS.) All the mannequins had names. And I thought, “Wow, that tulle is good.” (My hair never seemed big enough for me; I always felt like I was this small person.) And I brought Johnny a pair of sunglasses. He said to me, “You dress so unusual.” I said, “Really? Because it doesn’t seem that way to me. I think you dress very unusual.”