Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read online

  The wrestling connection kept growing to the point where the executives from the label were in on it. I was warned that I might have a fight with Lou on “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s segment because he was saying a lot of stuff that I might not like, but I said that even though we were going to fight, I still wanted to promote women’s lib somehow. Dave Wolff said, “Just have him say women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and then we’ll do a whole fight thing with female wrestlers.” So the Fabulous Moolah was brought in. (I’ve always been unhappy that I never really got to know Moolah, who died a few years ago, like I would have liked to, because she was awesome.)

  So when Captain Lou said that thing about being barefoot and pregnant, I had a freakout on the show. I turned over a table and I pulled Lou’s beard and hit him over the head with a bag. But they showed a clip of it on Entertainment Tonight as if it were real! I was watching it with Dave Wolfe, and we were laughing, and saying, “How could you not see the humor? It’s so ridiculous.” It was funny. But my friend Rose called me up and said, “Cyn, when you freaked out like that, people saw you angry.” She was worried.

  Working with Vince McMahon was very different for us. It became challenging at times because it was taking a lot of time away from making music. But we did a lot of really fun stuff that left its mark on wrestling and on Dave Wolff and me. When we were in it, Dave was like a little kid. And if you talk to anybody working in professional wrestling you’ll see that same little kid look in their eyes. It was something that I was able to share that with Dave Wolff.

  While all this was going on, we were getting ready to do the video for “Time After Time,” the second single. Edd was directing again, and he got a scriptwriter to come in and write it. I changed some things I didn’t like, which everybody does, and I said, “I want my mother in it, and I want the vision of her mother to haunt her.” Dave was also going to be in the video (he wanted to be in the video—Dave liked being in the limelight), and I wanted to do something that was really going to surprise him. So I had my hair cut and shaved in a checkerboard pattern, and I didn’t let him see it. So when I pull off my hat in that scene in the diner, that was really him freaking out.

  It was important to me that we were natural and human in that video. I wanted to convey somebody who walked her own path and did not always get along with everyone and did not always marry the guy. At the end of the video, when I get on the train and wave goodbye to Dave, Edd said, “Okay, you’ll look out the window, waving goodbye, and you’ll have this one tear running down your cheek.” I said, “Are you crazy? What do I look like, Bette Davis?” But much to my surprise, I was able to cry. While shooting the scene leading up to that, when I’m carrying the duffel bag, I thought about when I was hitchhiking in Vermont. All I had was that small duffel bag. It contained everything I owned. I wondered then if I’d be okay—if I would be able to make something of myself. I then came back to the present moment of shooting this video for a song I wrote after having “made it”—more importantly, I’d survived. That was the thought that moved me to tears.

  To convey the sadness of this person leaving her old life to start a new one—with no one, striking out on her complete own—I thought we could show an old movie that conveyed a mood of loss, and I said to Edd, “I know a movie that’s really fun—The Garden of Allah with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer.” And again we used Biff and Laura from Screaming Mimi’s to help out with the decor in the house and trailer scenes, which was just as important as the clothing fashion. Because again, you don’t just wear it, you live it. And a video is my record, visually. It can’t just be from outer space. I wanted a sound and a look that worked together. Which quickly became a pain in the ass to the corporate people and managers, because they just wanted me to do all the promotion and have somebody else do the rest of it. But that’s not what it was for me. I’m sure they thought I was some kind of control freak, but to me, it was performance art. It was creating a world—and a life and people in it.

  The Airstream trailer in the scene at the beginning was in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey and unbeknownst to us there was dog shit all over because the guy who owned it had dogs. When Dave had to run out after me, he was stepping in that dog shit.

  Another thing about that video is that even though the town looks desolate, a couple thousand people filled the streets, just standing around watching us. That was a big shock. If you had panned the camera around, you wouldn’t have believed it. We didn’t even have any security—it never crossed our minds that we’d need it.

  Then I sat in the edit again, but this time with a brilliant editor that Edd was able to get. His name was Norman Smith and he used to edit for Robert Altman. From that man I learned a great, great deal. In those days, you had two reels of film and you used razor blades to cut and splice—it wasn’t done on a computer. Sometimes it took a really long time, and everybody would go, “You have so much happening, so why do you gotta do that?” But I loved visuals and I loved the whole music-film thing, and I saw the possibility of film moving like music.

  “Time After Time” went to number one on the singles chart in June of 1984. And here’s the thing: I never had a filter before I was famous, and I didn’t have one after, either. I really should have shut up sometimes. But of course I never did. I mean, listen: I’m not Saint Cyndi. I used to say I was Saint Cyndi of a Feces, because wherever shit fell, there I was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THERE WERE A lot of highs and lows during that time. Like I was on the cover of Rolling Stone in May of 1984. A very famous photographer took the photo, Richard Avedon, and all I wanted was to look as pretty as Annie Lennox did in her Rolling Stone cover. But instead they used a photo that I thought made me look ugly. I cried when I saw it and thought, “If I look that ugly, who’s going to buy it?” You should have seen the photos they didn’t use, which were so much nicer.

  And Ms. magazine voted me one of the women of the year, which, let me tell ya, was such an honor for a bra-burner like me. But it was hard to take it all in, because I had basically been working since 1983 promoting the album or touring. When you’re doing that stuff, you’re away from home like three-quarters of the time. I’d go to Los Angeles, then to Japan, and then to Australia. That’s how it was—I just kept going around the world. I’d come back, maybe get a day or two off, but it wasn’t really a break because I’d be dealing with jet lag. Then I had to get back to work.

  Fame was happening on a level that Epic had hoped for but didn’t expect. I mean, I had four top five hits in a row from She’s So Unusual. They had success with other female artists, but people were screaming over me.

  No one ever really prepares you for success. I think every kid, to some degree, wants to be famous. I know I did, but it was because I wanted to make a record, and the only way you could make a record and have a recording career was if you were famous. So I spent a good deal of time preparing for fame—like, I would do interviews in my head when I was in the shower. I don’t know why. (I was also a little nutty.) And if I felt wronged by someone, I would also, in the shower, give my acceptance speech for the big award that I was going to get—like the Grammys or whatever.

  But fame is nothing like I could have imagined. It seemed to turn everything backward from what I remembered my life to be. I always lived on the outside, and it was so bizarre when I became famous because all of a sudden I was on the inside. Funny thing was, I started to see a strange irony going on: The same mental idiots who threw rocks at me for what I used to wear went out and bought the same kinds of clothes.

  I’d see versions of myself everywhere. And my funny little dirty trick was that I was always teasing very normal-looking people that I was perfectly normal—that I was the girl next door. Then the normal sucked up the abnormal and made it normal. All of a sudden, there was a movement of people dressing in things they wouldn’t have dared to wear before they saw me.

  Maybe I made it a little easier for kids who were different from t
he norm. Because for one minute, everything was reversed, and the different people became the norm and the more conservative people became different. And it really wasn’t just young people. My music bled through generations.

  My hairdo, my clothes—everything—became fashion. I wore corsets like you would wear a blouse, and then Madonna did it after me, and after a while, everybody wore corsets. It was weird to be totally sucked up and taken. And what’s also ironic is that a lot of my looks came from the fact that I couldn’t afford to get what I really wanted, so I had to be innovative. Like when everyone was wearing long chains, all I could afford was a chain or two, so I would get strands of rhinestones that you could buy for a quarter from the flea markets and hook them together to make a kind of belt. And then somebody actually started selling chains with rhinestones.

  People would write about my “grab-bag fashion.” Then I did a show in Detroit, and while I was performing—really getting everybody going—people in the audience started pulling things off of me. At that time, I was still shopping for every little thing, saving for this and that, and was finally able to buy stuff like the chain-and-rhinestone belt. So when people just reached out and took my stuff, I was kind of like, “What are you doing? You’re ripping this skirt that I got on layaway!” It was really upsetting at first. That, and the screaming.

  But I knew I was doing something good when I saw three generations of women come to my concerts: grandmothers with rhinestones, mothers with spray-dyed hair, and their little kids dressed as some weird-ass version of me. I realized then that I had their attention. I was speaking to three generations, and that’s what I wanted. By bringing my mom into the mix, and people like Captain Lou, I was able to speak to a very wide and diverse audience. And my feeling is: When you climb to the top of the mountain, you better have something to say. I never had a problem opening up my big mouth, and it didn’t change when I was famous. Like I said, I was always saying the wrong things to the right people.

  I especially spoke up for women’s rights. In the beginning no one really came out and said they were a feminist. I did. I never said “humanist” like a lot of other women artists did. And when the “Papa Don’t Preach” video came out, with Madonna dancing around in her sexy outfit, I had something to say about that. If you’re a teen mother who wants to keep her baby—number one, you’re not going to look like Madonna, dancing around. Number two, it ain’t gonna be that easy. Fathers don’t always come around at the end to give you their blessing. The guy who knocked you up doesn’t always stay around. Number three, every woman should still have a choice. I was proud to have spoken out for what I knew was right, but the record company and my manager freaked out.

  Another time, I went to Japan and the reporters brought up “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and asked, “Do you think it’s right for a young woman to stay out all night long?” I said, “It seems so to me. Men do it.” There were still women in kimonos walking behind their husbands in Japan at that time and when I saw that, I was like, “That’s gotta change.” So everything I talked about when I was in Japan was about equality—everything. I turned every conversation back to, “Well, look at it this way—if you want a strong society, if you want to compete in the world, you can’t just use half your people—you need to use all your power.” They would look at me like I was presenting a new idea—and of course I wasn’t. But it was coming from this little fuckin’ woman who looked like an alien to them. But they like aliens. When I went to Japan, I realized why I had caught on: My hair was bright orange, I wore funny clothes, and I had war paint on my face. Just like some of their cartoons.

  I did the same thing when I went to Italy. I took a page from Gertrude Stein and told the press that the three biggest oppressors of women are the church, the family, and the government. It’s true.

  God, I did a ton of press that year. And after a while when I was repeating the same thing over and over and over, I just felt like saying, “Listen—forget the questions, don’t be silly, stop everything, run right out, get yourself a ticket, purchase the album. It’s the best thing you’ll ever buy.” But of course you can’t do that.

  So I was working nonstop, but Dave and I had some fun. We were riding around in limos all the time. I was jumping on beds in hotel rooms (but then, I’ve always jumped on the beds, in hotels and at home). It was like, “Look at us! We’re livin’ large!” But it was also surreal. I’d walk into an event and people would be screaming at me the way I used to scream over the Beatles, ripping at my clothes. And it was usually girls, which was strange for me. I understood why young girls would scream for guys—they’d think they were cute. But girls screaming over girls, I didn’t understand. After a while I realized that it was admiration—that I was kind of their hero for opening my knee-jerk big fat mouth. I said things that other people wouldn’t say. I guess it made me endearing—but of course it also made people hate me.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening—that I couldn’t go anywhere, that there was hysteria when I did go somewhere. I’d go out to eat and somebody would always come up to me, always. I couldn’t have one single minute to myself, and the sad thing was that the people I was with that I hadn’t seen for a long time—the ones I could finally afford to take out to eat—started to get upset. It’s strange to be constantly interrupted and they weren’t used to it.

  Going to dinner was mostly what I did socially. I had a boyfriend, so it’s not like there were any wild parties. For my thirty-first birthday, I celebrated at a Chinese restaurant and invited all my friends—that’s about as wild as it got. After shows, I’d go back to the hotel with Dave, take a hot bath, stretch, and go to bed while he went and played cards with his friends. Or if we were home together he would go to the other side of the loft we had gotten downtown in the Thread Building, and play video games like Super Mario or Pinball. After watching him play awhile I’d head over to the other side of the apartment and watch old movies because I couldn’t take it.

  Since I was with Dave, there was never any going out on the town or going dancing. He didn’t dance. Our life together was business stuff and homebody stuff. I loved Dave, but I wished that I could have known other artists and done more things. Sometimes when he wasn’t around, I’d go to clubs and sing at open-mic nights. I tried to find other musicians because that’s the one thing I missed—other musicians, other artists, not just people that the manager finds for you to write with. There was only one musician who came by my apartment to see me and I really liked: Boy George. He came with Marilyn, the transgender singer. I loved Boy George and I was so excited to see another artist. We sat around talking, and then when it got late, we were like, “Let’s go eat.” And at that time, which is hard to believe now, there weren’t any places to eat near us that were open late except for one place, called the Green Kitchen.

  Usually with other famous people I was a little goofy. I’d trip over my own feet a little. Because I was still me. You know? Even at Epic I was more comfortable going out to lunch with the secretaries than with the record people. Although I was the one who was supposed to be the spoiled brat, I didn’t really feel like that, because all I did was work (and fight for getting what I wanted).

  For my first major tour, I played a lot of colleges. And I always wanted women on the tour because my band was filled with men, but every time I asked for a woman, Dave Wolff would say, “They don’t play as good as men.” Which isn’t true.

  Concrete Blonde opened for me once. They were a trio, and on the first night, they did not do so good. So I told my tour manager to call up my agent, Barbara Skydel, and say, “Hey, I don’t know what’s up with this band.” So the tour manager took them off the tour. But they were committed to open for me the next night. Well, that night, they were awesome. So I called Barbara back and said, “Wait a minute—these guys aren’t really bad at all.” They did not want to come back, though. They were mad. That’s all right, because maybe that criticism was a catalyst for Johnette to try even harder. I think
sometimes anger helps you move forward.

  Basically, I didn’t have background singers or any of that stuff on my tours in the beginning. The guy who played guitar kind of sang background and I would sing lead and then switch to background and join him so the sound was a little fuller, and then go back to singing lead. He was a terrific guitar player and he had red hair too. So that looked really good onstage. It was a lot for my voice to handle. My band was wonderful, but I always felt like I could have really used some background singers. I would have loved to have some women with me on tour, either as singers or musicians, but again every time I brought up hiring a female musician Dave would say there weren’t any good ones.

  The audiences kept getting bigger. Usually, before I went onstage, I was a wreck. It was always a rush backstage. Sometimes while my makeup artist was doing my makeup—I did my own hair—I’d start doing my vocal exercises. Like I said, I always had a pot and a hot plate so I could steam my voice (for around ten minutes because I never had the time to do it longer). I’d blow up a balloon to work my lungs. Then I’d get dressed and walk around, being nervous. I was always worried that I was not going to be good enough. I was always peeking outside and counting filled seats to see if I did okay, and then wondering if they were going to get their money’s worth. If the place was not sold out, I’d tell myself, “Well, that’s okay—then you show everyone what the people who didn’t buy tickets missed.” Ya know, I kind of still do the same thing.

  I’d try and meet up with the band beforehand, to say, “Have a nice show,” but I was always kept apart. And no, I didn’t do a prayer circle before the show. I hate the whole prayer-circle action. Because my Lord is probably not your Lord. I mean, look at me: What do you think? A woman, or a drag queen, or someone who is really interested in fashion and music and the arts—maybe that’s the leader of my house of worship. Or maybe my house of worship is the House of Chanel? The only time I liked the whole prayer-circle thing was when I did it with Cassandra Wilson. I adore her. She called me up one time when I was having a big fight with my husband, David, and I said, “Cassandra, I can’t talk right now, I’m having a big fight with my husband, I’ll call you later.” I thought that she was very insulted and thought I was rude. That was the last I spoke to her for a while. But as life would have it, we orbited back toward each other again in December of 2011, when she performed at the True Colors Fund show “Cyndi Lauper & Friends: Home for the Holidays.” I got to sing and play dulcimer while she played guitar. She’s still awesome.