Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read online

  This was a new time. It was the time of protests and thinking free and being free. Although I always thought that “free love” thing seemed like a dirty deal for women. It was free, but for who? Say you felt like you wanted all the liberties a man was afforded, and you wanted to sleep with whomever, right? You still were considered a tramp. And say, like a man, you chose not to sleep with someone? Then you were frigid or a lesbian. You should be able to have control over your body and your life—just like a man. But birth control had come into play over the previous decade. And at the time, young women and girls were dying all over the United States from illegal and unsafe abortions.

  Susan and I also formed a folk duo called Spring Harvest. (What the heck? I shoulda known that wouldn’t work. There’s no such thing as a harvest in the spring.) But it was still a great experience. We performed twice together in a small café in Queens, on a road that ran from Woodhaven Boulevard to the Alexander’s store on Queens Boulevard. It was a cute place, but they didn’t pay, and we had to get our friends to come see us. Later on in my professional life, I would come to know that setup as a “pay-to-play” situation. Instead of the club paying you, you’re kind of paying them by bringing your friends.

  At our first gig, a comic opened for us, and Elen and Wha came with their friend Dominic, who heckled the poor guy. Unfortunately Dominic was funnier than the comic, which was a big problem for us. When we went to check out everything before the place opened, the owner said to me, “Look, girlie, there’s no microphones here. But there’s an acoustic tile right up there on the ceiling. Aim up there, and everyone will hear ya.” Now, as far as I know, acoustic tiles control sound reverberation and are used to make the room sound better. But this guy didn’t have a whole ceiling of acoustic tiles like you’re supposed to—he just had one tile hanging slightly on a diagonal from a dropped cork ceiling, like the kind my friend’s father used to refinish their basement. I aimed for that tile from not really a stage, but more like a wooden dance floor in the center of the room. I aimed and I aimed all night, especially on the soft high singing parts I did in Eric Andersen’s “Thirsty Boots.” The guy had me believing that it worked. (Hey, it was my first gig.) Funny how now I can still aim my voice if I need to.

  The duo was a distraction and contrast to school and home and my sister leaving. All of a sudden I could function and define myself. I felt like maybe there was something for me to be good at. But that didn’t work out, because we were so young. We did have a meeting with an agent/manager once. Susan found him. Susan was one of those really informed take-action types of people. Susan was even writing Joan Baez’s mother letters. I guess it started as fan mail and turned into her asking for advice. And to Joan Baez’s mom’s credit, Susan got responses. Anyway, we played for this agent/manager and he informed us that we needed to have some boys in the band, so that if we got married, we wouldn’t split up. What the heck?

  While this was happening I was still struggling in school. I will always remember that zero I got in art, because of how I felt like such a zero sitting in what felt like a remedial art class. I remember being handed small round-edged scissors, like the kind you used in kindergarten. I was told to cut paper to make paper cones, which we would glue together with a nontoxic glue (because some of the kids in the class were already in-toxic-ated).

  So I went to the head of the art department and asked not to be punished anymore. Somehow I talked my way into taking his course instead. He liked my work, so I was able to go to an art program at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan for summer school, which I really liked. But after that, I was back at Richmond Hill High School, failing again.

  So this time, they put me in a different program, one for kids who will never go to college. They teach you things like how to be a file clerk, so that’s what I did. The building overlooked the docks, and I used to look at the boats and wonder what it was like to be Tugboat Annie. In my mind, I was living the secret life of Walter Mitty. And on that dock I used to find myself staring at, I wrote out a wish on a piece of paper that I folded into the shape of a boat and cast off to sea in the East River. I wished that someday I would meet someone like me who would be an artist and create and understand. Someone who remembered the child in themselves. I guess that’s like that Snow White song, “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

  About four years after I became famous, in 1988, Richmond Hill High School asked me to go to a reunion. As a “famous person,” I got a lot of stuff in the mail, and sometimes I actually got the time to open and read it. I was really on the hamster wheel at that time (when I sang “Money Changes Everything,” I knew exactly what that meant). One of my closest friends, who was also my first publicist, Katie Valk, was sitting at my kitchen table in the loft I owned in the American Thread Building. She worked with me when I was in the band Blue Angel. We had become really close the night we sat together when my band broke up. She patiently listened to me cry to her about it at a bar in the West Village and then she said, “Don’t be such a victim.” And she was right. So I moved on.

  Katie worked for a public relations firm called Solters/Roskin/Friedman, and she was one of the best publicists at that time. When I opened the letter from Richmond Hill asking me to go to a reunion, I said to Katie, “Yeah, right—they expelled me!” Now, at the time lots of famous folks were getting honorary college degrees. So Katie started laughing and said, “You should call them and tell them that you’ll only come if they nullify your expulsion and give you an honorary high school diploma.” So I said, “Yeah!” But I never thought they’d go for it. Silly me—they did. So I got an outfit for graduation with the help of my stylist at the time, Laura Wills, who said, “You should have shoes with fruit on them sticking out from your gown!” And I thought, “What a hoot,” so of course I did it.

  My mother came to the graduation and I saw her standing with her Polaroid camera. She was snapping furiously and calling to me from the crowd. She was so proud that I was getting that diploma. She had a tear on her cheek when I walked down the aisle, and I realized how important this high school diploma really was. This wasn’t just the General Equivalency Diploma I attained to attend my failed year at college. Nope—this was the genuine article.

  My mother even had a graduation party for me at a Japanese restaurant in Queens. She had some of her close friends there, too. She was so proud. She said, “You’ve finally done it.”

  As a teenager, I was searching for a better me, or a better way. I lived inside my head: I’d talk to myself, hum to myself, sing to myself, and chant to myself. There were certain songs that helped me get by. Joni Mitchell had songs about freedom and ones that offered a refuge to share my loneliness with hers. There was also a Beatles song John Lennon sang called “Across the Universe,” which is where I felt like I lived anyway. I also started going to Greenwich Village a lot.

  I first went to the Village when my sister and brother and I were little, and my mother used to drive us through it. She’d go, “Look, kids, those are the beatniks. Look, those are the hippies.” My mother always loved exotic things. She didn’t want us to have her life. She was very sheltered, and she didn’t want us to be afraid of the world. She wanted to be a bohemian. No one in Queens went to museums, but she did, and she read about Chinese architecture and yogis and Shakespeare. But she’s Sicilian, and they have this mind-set that keeps women down.

  My mom was pretty cool. When I was eleven and the Beatles were coming to New York, my mother drove my sister, her friend Diane, and me to the Belt Parkway where the Hilton Hotel is by the airport, so we could see the Beatles drive by, and she left us there for a while. She knew we weren’t going to run in traffic. So we waited. And waited. All of a sudden we saw cars coming and it was them. So I started screaming, and I shut my eyes, and by the time I realized I should open my eyes, I’d missed it. I was all dressed nice, too. I had dark jean clam diggers with pointy shoes and a sleeveless green, blue, and black plaid shirt with a man-tailored collar. I’ve never actua
lly met a Beatle, but I saw Tony Bennett once when I was a kid at the 1964–1965 World’s Fair. Later, I got to sing with him, and I said to him, “You know, I met you once at the World’s Fair. You were coming down the escalator and I was going up. I waved and you waved back. Remember me?” I thought that was funny, but I think it scared him. Russ Titelman, a producer who was working with me, said I sounded like a stalker.

  IN 1970 I left home to stay at my sister’s and Wha’s basement apartment in Valley Stream at 6 Ash Street. At that time everyone was reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, so we used to call it a hobbitshire. I remember wearing green jeans and a yellow T-shirt and I thought, “Hobbits wear yellow and green and brown and live in a hole in the ground. That’s me!”

  My sister and I tried to get my eleven-year-old brother to come live with us, too, but my mom took him back. It killed me to leave him. But now I had to deal with my life and how I would live. And to my mother’s credit, she came again to take me shopping for clothes so I could get a job. And through the kindness of Wha’s mother’s family, the Pepitones (yes, like the baseball player), somehow we survived. Wha’s uncle Lou lied for me and gave me a recommendation for a job as a gal-Friday receptionist at a publishing house called Simon & Schuster at 251 Park Avenue South—in fact, the same one that’s publishing this book.

  But really, I was a gal Friday the thirteenth. I tried my best, except I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. My clothes were maybe too sexy. I got a mohair dress that was a little on the tight side, because it was a sweater dress, and some pony-hair boots, and some false eyelashes, and I used to sit at the desk like that. And when I got lunch, I brought back a beer. That wasn’t a good look—sitting in the front with a beer—and they came up to me afterward and said, “Uh, you need to get rid of the beer.” I really did try so hard, but I sucked. One day I was in my boss’s office and I picked the phone up to answer it for her, and when I put it down it was covered with sweat.

  I was there a couple months. That was kind of tough for them. Also, I’d fall asleep reading the mail. I would try my hardest not to, but it was dreadfully boring to me. There wasn’t a window in the file room. I could never find what the callers asked for. A lot of them yelled over the phone. Some hung up. But it wasn’t until the electric typewriter came in and I could only manage nineteen words per minute that my boss brought me into her office. She was a beautiful black woman who was smart and stylish and very kind to have put up with me that long. She said she liked me a lot, but I was the worst gal Friday she had ever seen. And, regrettably, she had to let me go.

  While I was struggling with my job, my sister was fired from hers. (I’m not too clear on why but the consensus was that it was because she wore the same thing every day.) Wha’s dad was a guitar teacher. He played in a wedding band, too. It was hard raising a family on that. So Wha’s mother was checking in on us and helping when she could. Sometimes she’d bring food. Wha knew how to make spaghetti and pea soup, which was pretty good. But the food and money situation wasn’t good. So I practiced not eating and learning how not to be hungry. And the one thing I didn’t know was if you fast you need to drink a lot of water, which I didn’t do.

  It was the winter of 1970. One day, when I was coming home from work, a little dog started following me. The little dog looked like a fox and a beagle. She walked beside me and never strayed. And in that minute I loved her, but I didn’t think I could have a dog. We had no money and what looked like no prospects at the time. But the dog didn’t give up. She started sleeping by our doorstep. And when Wha saw her, she took her in.

  Wha named the dog Sparkle because she had a mark on her back like a star. I had been reading The Little Prince at the time, and Sparkle looked like that fox to me. But unlike the fox in the book, not only wasn’t she a fox but she was pregnant with puppies and it was winter. She wasn’t going to be put back out in the snow. I had been reading other books aside from The Little Prince. There was Siddhartha, The Hobbit, Paul Twichell’s book on astral projection, and Grapefruit, which I refused to burn even though it said to in the back. I was looking to change the way I thought about the world. I was trying to become enlightened, awake. There was also a book on groupies that came out. Their sense of fashion was so fresh; it was this great mix of street and couture, which was so new to me because where I came from high fashion was Lord & Taylor and Gimbel’s.

  At the time, Eric Clapton’s song “Layla” was huge. George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album came out, the one with the song “What Is Life” on it and “Wah-Wah” (which of course spoke to Wha). We would listen and dance to the albums and stare at the covers. We would discuss life, love, what our future could be. Elen and Wha would play guitar. I would play too and sing or play recorder. Wha would get frustrated listening to us though. Sometimes she would explain how to change keys by counting on your hand to find the right progressions. (For example, C, F, and G is 1, 4, 5 in the key of C but it switches to D, G, and A in the key of D and A would become 5. You got that?)

  Sometimes she’d just get so frustrated that she would ask us to shut up. But that never bothered me, although it did my sister, and she’d eventually stop playing. I never cared about what other people felt about my playing and singing. I cared about how I felt. It provided a pause in life when I could feel sound vibrate through my body, and there’s nothing as soothing as certain notes vibrating through your body. For example, high notes make me feel like I am soaring high above the fray, never looking down or back.

  It was a different time then. There was a revolution of culture going on. The Age of Aquarius was coming. Times would radically change. The civil rights movement had come. I used to go down to the Fillmore, a club near Union Square. You could go down there, and even if you didn’t go inside, you could hang out on the line with the people. It was a scene, and they were just as cool as the people going on the stage. One night Elvin Bishop and his band were opening for Johnny Winter with special guest guitarist Rick Derringer was opening for them. Somehow I decided to go. I wanted to see the stylish groupies, too. I saw some of them sitting on a wall in the alley and called out to them. There was a small blond girl who called back to me and said, “Now when I say go, you go. Got it?” I said yes. So when she told me to walk directly behind Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer as they entered the building I did. I followed them backstage. Then a guy who was very agitated started scolding me. His name was Red Dog. He was the tour manager. He saw me and said, “Where were you? You’re supposed to be onstage now.” He mistook me for a backup singer. I tried to talk but I was having trouble forming the words, and he just threw me out of the dressing room. It was pretty amazing that later on in my life I got to know and work with Rick Derringer.

  During that time, I sang folk music and played folk guitar. There were the folkies, and there were the rockers, and you just didn’t mix them, because the rockers hated the folkies. But I was starting to lose my taste for folk and had become more intrigued with rock and roll, although I never thought I could sing it. I remember hearing Bonnie Bramlett from Delaney and Bonnie and thinking, “Oh, my voice will never do that, it’s way beyond what I can do.”

  But that day, when I watched those background singers from backstage, I realized that I could sing rock, too. They had a simple sound to their voices, and I thought, “My God, that’s really easy.” It was like the dust had cleared.

  I wasn’t thinking of singing as a career in those days. I was going to be an artist, but I had to take a bunch of different jobs to pay the bills. When I moved in with my sister and Wha in Valley Stream, we learned where we could work and eat. Like you could go to the Hare Krishna temple and if you cleaned for them, they would feed you. This was when George Harrison came out with the whole Hare Krishna action. And when I started seeing Hare Krishnas around town, they had a good vibe. I was into all kinds of spiritual stuff and I liked the chanting, and the idea that a god could be your friend instead of all the brimstone and fire I’d grown accustomed to growing up as
a Catholic. It was a refreshing change from the yelling I’d heard from the pulpit as a child. I’d sit there trying to understand what the guy was going on about and think, “Wow, look what God did to his son, Jesus. Now imagine what he’s going to do to me. I’m not even related.”

  I could deal with a kind of god like Krishna. A god who doesn’t hate women and doesn’t stone them to death. Funny, I had always looked at the heaven represented in different books as my idea of hell. I always felt like, “Okay, let me get this straight: While I’m alive, you’re going to freakin’ torture me and deny my human rights as an individual, so that when I die, hoping for a better place, I get the same raw deal in heaven too?” No thanks.

  So I would clean the temple—I mean, granted, the food they served was loaded with sugar but at least I was eating. It’s just that after being so hungry and then eating all that sugar, I was basically seeing stars. So I’d be cleaning the bathrooms and the pictures would kind of move, or Krishna would wink at me, and I’d laugh so hard because it was funny. But whenever I cleaned the temple, I felt like I was cleaning my heart. Then they pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to join the Hare Krishnas. They felt I was special. They told me the head guy would choose a husband for me and I’d marry him and have children. The pièce de résistance was when they said that as a woman, I’d have to eat in the kitchen with the children, while the men ate in the main dining room after I served them. I busted out laughing and said, “Listen, I’m Italian and I already know this story about women as chattel. I don’t do that shit anymore.”

  I watched my mother struggle her whole life, and my aunt and grandmother, and the whole Sicilian mentality of keeping the women in the house really only meant free domestic help under the guise of protection and reverence. Yeah, my ass. I always thought, “You can sell that to another mule you happen to meet on the road, but it ain’t gonna be me.” When I was growing up, Gloria Steinem was always a big hero of mine, and Yoko, and then I read The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer and all of a sudden things started to fall into perspective.