Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read online

  My sister, Elen, always wanted to be Paul, so I was John. Whatever my sister was doing, I wanted to be with her. My mom told me that I was born to be her friend, and I took that literally. Besides, I didn’t mind being John, because he was married to someone named Cynthia. And that was really my name, not just Cindy. And I had a dream once that I was brushing my teeth with John Lennon and spitting in the same sink. (Later, I told that to Sean Lennon, but I think it scared him.)

  By singing with my sister like that, and listening to John’s voice, I learned harmony and the structure of songs. By the time I was eleven, I began writing with my sister. When Elen graduated from junior high school, she got an electric Fender guitar and amp, and I got her acoustic guitar when I was graduating from sixth grade. Our first song was called “Sitting by the Wayside.” I guess if I heard my kid write that now I’d be worried, but we were living in the protest era.

  Before that, I was always singing along to Barbra Streisand from my mother’s record collection. I also performed for myself a lot with my mother’s Broadway albums: My Fair Lady, The King and I, South Pacific. I was Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin. I was also Richard Harris in Camelot. At times when I sang I would act like my relatives, because they were always very dramatic. (They were Sicilian, after all.) But mostly I liked the way it felt to change my voice, and when I sang, I could imagine the leading man right in front of me. My interior life and my play life were so real to me that I could make up anything. I guess the saddest thing about being introduced to the Supremes and the Beatles, though, was that all of a sudden there was a difference between my mother’s music collection and mine.

  In high school I listened to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, the Four Tops, and Cream. Motown was king, and, of course, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. When I got older, they came out with The White Album, and I put each of their pictures on the walls of my room. That’s where I’d daydream, write poems, paint, write songs, or play other people’s songs on my guitar. Sometimes I’d hear my mom call out to me to clean my room and I’d try to ignore her. Once I must have pushed her right over the edge because she finally came in and said, “I want you, and all your friends (pointing to the pictures on the walls), to clean this room up right now.” It was not easy for her.

  I also liked to spend some time with my nana upstairs in her apartment. The air was a little lighter there, especially when Grandpa wasn’t home. She’d tell me dramatic stories about her life in Sicily, while making very unusual sandwiches made of cottage cheese and peanut butter that she spread on toasted “light caloric” bread. She said that even though the sandwich might seem like an odd choice, it was very healthy and didn’t taste bad either. Her stories seemed a little like Aesop’s fables told in a thick Italian accent.

  She once told me about a young man who would stand and wait in front of her window when she was a young girl just to catch a glimpse of her. As she told the story, she would act it out for me. She was very captivating, and as I looked through that window with her as she gazed down at her young suitor, I could understand why the guy felt that way about her. She described the length of her hair and swung gently around to show me how far it went down her back. I could almost see it move with her and feel how soft it was. Nana’s hair was now short and cut to just under her ears, with a natural wave and gray highlights.

  She told me how her father would not allow this courtship because the young man wore glasses; her father said, “What if when he gets older he loses his sight? What will you do then?” The smitten young man knew my grandmother liked to sew. So he gave her a little sewing kit, and therein lay the lesson: “Never give anything sharp or with a point on it to someone you love, because it will go straight to their heart,” she would always say. And like Aesop’s fables, my grandmother’s stories had twists and turns in them, but with strange sad endings instead of happily ever after. I always felt bad that she didn’t get to be happy in her young life. Her stories used to fill me with so many emotions. I would say things to her like, “Boy, Nana, if I was there with ya, I wouldn’t let them hurt you. I’d give them such a hard time, they’d be sorry.” But she would say, “You did what you were told in that time.” And I’d come to realize that no matter how much I felt I was traveling back in time with her when she told these stories, I could never undo the wrong done to her because of a ridiculous mentality that kept women back.

  As a kid, I heard a lot of sad stories about women. My mom loved art and music so much, but she wasn’t allowed to accept a scholarship to a high school for voice, because my grandparents said, “Only whores go to school in Manhattan.” This was another ridiculous belief that wore on me. In the end, my mom never graduated. She became sickly with gynecological issues and wound up dropping out of a local high school in Queens. She then went to work to help support her family. I knew she wanted it to be different for me.

  There was another story I heard as a kid that started with, “You see Aunt Gracie? She was so beautiful when she was young, she could have been a model!” I always thought that when you heard a beginning like that, the story would be something upbeat. But no. This was another sad one that went like this: Aunt Gracie had a friend who took pictures of her and made a portfolio so that she could go to the modeling agencies. But my grandparents found the pictures and tore them up. I guess they were horrified to see their youngest daughter posing in a shorts set and smiling so pretty for the camera. I think they also tore up part of her spirit, because she never went back to the photographer to get other copies.

  She still had a killer smile and a great joy in her, but it was coupled with big lows. Sometimes you just never knew what you did to set her off. And she didn’t feel well a lot in her life. We thought, as it was said in the vernacular of my old neighborhood, that the sickness “was set in by unhappiness.” But I do have her to thank for my cousins who I grew up with, Susie and Vinny. What a gift they are.

  Around thirty-five years after I heard that story about Aunt Gracie as a kid, life brought those pictures to me. I was remaking “Disco Inferno” with Soul Solution. It was 1999. I was talking with Bobby, half of the Soul Solution team, and he told me his uncle took pictures of my aunt when she was young. He gave them to me and as I looked at them, I thought, “Ya know what? My mom was right. My aunt was very beautiful. She really could have modeled.” And for the time, she was tall enough. She was five foot seven. She looked glamorous, like a young Polly Bergen. Aunt Gracie wore an artichoke hairdo in the picture, which was the rage in the fifties. (Natalie Wood wore the same style in Rebel Without a Cause.) There was also a glint of mischief in her eyes, mixed with a little bit of hope. The underlying sadness that was in her face later in life was missing from those pictures. It must have crept in bit by bit as she accepted what my grandparents thought was safe for her life. “I could have been, I should have been, I would have been, if not for . . .” is a constant refrain that has always haunted me, whether in my mother’s voice or in the many forgotten voices from around the old neighborhood.

  So when you ask me if I knew that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” would be a hit, and I say I didn’t want to do the song at first because I didn’t think it was especially good for women, maybe you understand better why. But then my producer Rick Chertoff said to me, “Think of what this song could mean.” And then I saw my grandmother’s, my aunt’s, and my mother’s faces in my head. And I thought that maybe I could do something and say something so loud that every girl would hear—every girl, every color. And I said to myself, “Hell yeah, I’ll make an anthem! Maybe it’ll be something that will bring us all together and wake us up.” It would be a movement right under all the oppressors’ noses, and no one would know about it until there was nothing they could do to stop it. I was going to make it work come hell or high water. I’d make it work for every poor sucker whose dreams and joys were dashed out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I HAD WANTED TO go to a performing arts high school so b
adly. But when my mom went to discuss this with my eighth-grade guidance counselor, he asked her if she wanted me to end up waiting tables like she did. He made her cry over the idea that I might wind up in her shoes one day. That rat—I never liked that guy. So this so-called authority told my mom that because our family had worked in the fashion industry and my uncle had made a name for himself as a pattern maker, the High School of Fashion Industries would be a better fit for me. Miraculously, I passed their entrance test.

  The best thing about going to Fashion Industries was the adventure of going to a vocational school in Manhattan on the A train. I spent a ton of time on the subway watching the straphangers. I took a great pleasure in being part of that community. Manhattan wasn’t remotely like Ozone Park, Queens. As a high schooler, I was living the life my mom never did. I was going to school in Manhattan! My grandparents had it so wrong. This wasn’t about becoming a whore. It was about becoming cultured and educated and wanting more. I was going to the mecca of art, music, and fashion. I was traveling every day to a place where people were more glamorous. Maybe they were afraid that if my mother became cultured she wouldn’t accept “safe” and “meek.”

  I was never good at time management, so there were many frenzied moments. Once I cut and sewed together a dress for school and then ran up the six blocks to Liberty Avenue, like I always did, in chunky high shoes, carrying my portfolio in my hand and my books under my arm and a handbag over my shoulder. The dress had the seams sewn on the outside, which I thought looked good—it was just that the idea of deconstruction hadn’t really come into its own yet. I must have been a sight.

  As a freshman at Fashion Industries you took different kinds of sewing classes, like the power-sewing machine class or the fine-material machine class. I got a little depressed in the shoe-making class because all we sewed was a calfskin knife case. I also imagined that the class led to a job at a shoemaker under a pile of broken shoes that needed to be mended. My fine-material machine sewing class teacher dressed in a very old-fashioned way, with a knee-length straight skirt and a short-sleeve shirt with cuffs, and she’d always stuff a pressed handkerchief up the left sleeve. She gave me a seventy and told me the knots on the end of my needle and thread for hand stitching were like torpedoes.

  The art class was the kicker. I actually loved it but got on the far wrong side of the teacher. She wanted me to move my seat and I didn’t understand why, so I said I wouldn’t. Then she said the only way I’d pass was if I brought in twelve paintings by the end of the term. So I painted and painted. And I loved it. I would stay up all night in my room with poor ol’ Elen in the other twin bed next to mine, with her head under her pillow while I painted. Looking back, I see that I was very selfish for having the light on. But my big sister was a good sport. I used watercolors and poster paint, which was very easy to maneuver without an easel. I just painted on the floor. I created pictures of the woods at night or my grandmother’s garden, which was moonlit right outside my bedroom window.

  Then the day came when I proudly handed them in to my teacher. But she was being threatened by one of the bigger girls in the class, who told her that she better not fail her. The school wasn’t exactly in the best neighborhood and there was always some rough trade to maneuver around. Since she was busy, I said, “Here are the paintings,” and put them down in front of her and left.

  When I got my report card, I received a zero in art. The teacher said she never got any paintings from me. I should have remembered one of those Aesop’s fables—the one with the moral that goes something like “Always get a receipt.” I was crushed about losing all that work. There were other failures, too, like my English and math classes. I had mostly spent my time painting and I never got much else done.

  Everybody told me to study hard, but nobody ever taught me how to study. I was just told that I’d better learn or I’d wind up like everyone else around me, which was very upsetting. But I just never knew where to start, and it was always a daunting task that I would put off, until I just fell asleep. There were times when I would open up a book and leave it open next to me, completely terrified. I was too anxious to study and felt doomed to fail. So I failed. I figured if I was going to fall, I might as well hit the bottom and get the worst of it over with. I remember bringing home a report card with every grade a failing one, and the zero in art. I guess there was a moral I should have learned from that experience, too, but it was too crushing to think about. I remember my stepfather looking at my report card and saying, “You failed gym? Isn’t that like failing lunch?”

  But before I flunked out, I was put in something called a nonachieving-genius class. There was this English teacher in there who actually was very inspiring. She brought in a Janis Ian song and laid it out like a poem instead of lyrics. Song lyrics at their best are poems, and that part interested me. What inspired my English teacher to think I was worth helping was my understanding of the Hemingway novel The Old Man and the Sea. I guess she didn’t want to throw me back in the water once she saw how that book caught my interest and how I understood the metaphors that she loved so much.

  But in the end I wasn’t a nonachieving genius—I was just a nonachiever. And that’s how I entered the Richmond Hill High School annex as a freshman again. My sister, Elen, was a senior there and I was always welcome at her lunch table, and there I didn’t feel so left back. And when Elen graduated, I stayed on with younger friends and did half the freshman year again. I got very depressed, though. I just failed and failed. I started to feel like I was in a recurring bad dream and that somewhere there had to be a different reality.

  For me, the little pleasantries, like the sunset or sunrise, or when the trees bloomed, or birds sang, or I saw the flowers in my grandmother’s garden, were the only distractions I could find to keep myself going. I never felt inside that I fit into this world. I always had one foot where I stood and one foot somewhere else. They used to say I was just a daydreamer. I did daydream, but I used to write a lot of poetry, too, and draw whatever I could.

  The few friends I had after Elen left school declared themselves gay, and when they came out, I thought, “Ooh, I’m gay because they’re gay.” So I tried. One of my close friends said she was in love with me. Well, I didn’t want to lose my friend, so we held hands, and then we would kiss, but it wasn’t how I was feeling. I even read The Fox by D. H. Lawrence, but no matter how I tried, I just wasn’t feeling what she felt. I loved her, but not like that. I had to tell her the truth: I wasn’t really a lesbian. I had to come out as a heterosexual.

  As graduation kept slipping a year ahead of me, and my extra time in high school started to feel like serving a double term in misery, I quit. I was washed up. I was seventeen. After I left, I had a few friends who helped me forget my predicament. One was a girl from the neighborhood, Susan Monteleone. She lived around the corner and across the street from me. She even had an older sister the same age as my sister. And best of all, she played guitar like us. She was always a better guitar player than me. (I’m grateful to just be able to play at all. I find it soothing, even though now I usually just play dulcimer and only use guitar for writing. I even tune my guitar in fifths, like a dulcimer.)

  Susan also turned me on to the women’s movement. We went to a demonstration for women’s rights together at the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. First we met some women Susan knew at a hotel. They seemed a little angry and some looked like hard-core lesbians. Once I heard some older men from my neighborhood refer to the women’s movement as “a bunch of angry lesbians.” I guessed at the time that what they meant was that a woman just needed to get laid, and then she would go back to the old boys’ system quick enough. But when I listened to these women talk, it seemed they had a lot to be angry about. They were talking about civil rights for all women, theirs and mine too. This was beyond all stereotypes—this was revolutionary. Susan was talking to a woman she knew, and then when everyone started to leave for the park, somebody said we could go with them in thei
r limo.

  There was a lot of hubbub and excitement in the car. Susan and I had been practicing what we would say and what we would burn for a couple of weeks. Susan was burning the hard plastic rollers she slept on for years to make her hair look good. That, I understood. How long can you put up with that before throwing the damn things out? That was thrilling, as thrilling as riding in the big long limo with all of those different types of women, whose mere chatter was the most inspirational information I had heard in a long time.

  I understood everything they were talking about in that limo and for the most part agreed. But deep down I secretly still loved some of the fashion they looked down on, even though I agree that there are elements of fashion that are anti-women, like high heels that slow us down. Being in that car at the age of fifteen was so intense though that I could never say, in my hand-me-down Queens vernacular, “I still love them shoes, though.”

  As for my big moment in front of the trash can, I brought one of my mother’s old bras that she gave me after I outgrew my training bra. It was pointy and old-fashioned. I walked up to the mesh trash basket, held up my mother’s old bra, and said, “I burn this for me, for my mother, and for my grandmother!” It was a good moment in my life that offset a lot of not-so-victorious moments. And I also felt my mom should have thrown that bra away, anyway.