Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

by Lauper, Cyndi

  So I turned around and said to Jeff, “Look, I can see you got your whole process here going on. I respect it, but do me a favor, take a fuckin’ walk to have your nervous breakdown, and then when we start the scene, come back here. Because you’re distracting this guy, and you’re distracting me. Okay? And I’ll tell you something else: If you keep doing this, this movie won’t be a murder mystery anymore, because I’ll kill you right here in front of everybody.” Everyone sort of took a step back. But you know what? Some people push you and push you, and they expect you not to say anything. Well, it ain’t gonna happen with me. I’m always going to say something. And when I get angry, I get arrogant. Arrogance is probably my biggest fault.

  Jeff was an interesting guy, and filming the movie could have been really great. You’d think we would have gotten along. I mean, he’s an art dude. I’m sure he felt like, who the hell was I to have a lead in a movie when he worked all his life to get acting jobs? But he was the other lead, so what was the problem? Maybe something was going on in his life. His behavior seemed to reflect some kind of emotional frailty, but I couldn’t understand what was making him unhappy. At the time, he was with the most rockin’ chick, actress Geena Davis. I thought she was awesome. She taught me a Swedish song that I sing in the movie, because she has a Swedish background.

  Anyway, I fought to get Peter Falk hired as the third lead because I thought it would look good to have two guys with dark hair next to my light hair, and we speak in the same rhythm, but when he showed up on set, I found out he was a little eccentric. Like the camera operator would call me over and say, “Cyn, I got a nice light on you. Hit that mark and do that line for me.” Then Peter would come up and say, “Don’t listen to him. You don’t have to hit the mark. Just do it.” I’d think, “But if he took the time to light me and position everything, shouldn’t I stay on the spot?” But acting with Peter Falk was extraordinary, as crazy as he was.

  Other crazy things happened on the set too. Like one time, a producer came down and I heard him say, “Would you fuck her? Is she fuckable?” Or sometimes I’d start to work and one of the producers would get right in my eye line, looking right at me, watching, while the camera was on. It was incredibly distracting and strange, so then I’d have to say, “He’s right in my eye line—hey, could you not do that?” Then this whole time Jeff was going through whatever it was he was going through. And Peter Falk—this totally anarchist rebellion guy who I adored in the end—teamed up with Jeff against me. I was heartbroken that they shut me out. But maybe that was better for the role—you know what I mean? My character was supposed to have a little tension with Jeff.

  The power struggle and the trauma that went on underneath the movie overtook what could have been a fun and happy, funny film. You know how I talked about how you want to create music that will beckon the spirit? I always thought that acting was going to be similar to that; it would be like call-and-response—someone would say something to you, and you would respond, right? Make a connection? Not. At the time that I started to work in film, acting became about the close-up and about these actors who basically seemed to want to act alone. There was no sense of unity, and it was really disheartening for me because that’s what I was used to as a musician. I wanted them to be my friends but instead they were competitive assholes and I just couldn’t help but think, “I did this so I could work with Ron Howard, and he’s not even here, he’s working in New Zealand, and I wish I was in New Zealand, too, instead of here.”

  Not everybody was that way, though. The costume designer and the makeup and hair people were wonderful. And the woman who sewed the outfits was incredible. I learned so much from her, and from the camera and lighting guys. I always would watch them if I could, so I could see the monitor that they looked at, because that was the place that you were going to step into, and it was always magical. When you stepped into it, you became the picture and that was like painting. It was just like when you’re framing for when you paint a picture. I was so excited about absorbing everything on the set that it made everything kind of bearable.

  And there was plenty of stuff that was pretty unbearable, like when the film’s writer wanted me to take my clothes off in one scene. I said, “First of all, I don’t have that kind of figure. And second of all, why don’t you have a guy take his clothes off?” I finally figured out that I could wear a camisole thing so that I looked kind of cute and naked, but not completely naked. And I loved doing physical comedy. Like in one scene I went into a trance and started singing, and Jeff and Peter picked me up and carried me out while I was still singing. I tried really hard to stay absolutely stiff. I loved it because it was like a Marx Brothers routine. You know what else was nice? I got a cat while I was filming—my wonderful cat Nick, who gave me many years of joy and love.

  Unfortunately while working on the movie, I got endometriosis again, so I had another operation in Los Angeles. And then Columbia Pictures, the movie company, wanted me to write a song for Vibes, so I stayed in LA to figure out what I was going to write. At first I wrote a slower-tempo song called “Unconditional Love” with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, but the head of Columbia said, “This movie is a comedy—you can’t have a ballad.” So Dave Wolff proposed that I do “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China),” which was written by a guy named Richard Orange. I said, “But this film isn’t about China.” He said, “Yes, but that’s the joke. It’s so nutty.” So I rearranged the song and made it sound like the music I liked—kind of punk and tough and fast. But when it was released, radio stations felt it was too hard for them, and they wouldn’t play it. They were much more into playing ballads. And here’s the thing: They would have played “Unconditional Love.” Every time I failed, it was because I didn’t listen to my initial gut feeling and instead tried to appease other people. (That’s why when I met Lady Gaga to do MAC’s Viva Glam campaign, I said to her, “Don’t listen to anybody. Whatever creation you have in your head, do it, because now is your time, and if you give it up, you’re not going to be able to do it.”)

  When Vibes came out in 1988, they killed me in the reviews. They called it Bad Vibes and said my career would never recover. But now when I look at the movie, honestly, I don’t think I was bad. To tell you the truth, I really think I did a good job. My acting was very natural. The movie had a lilt to it, it wasn’t stiff, it was really entertaining, and it had heart. It was funny and quirky. It wasn’t supposed to be Shakespeare. It was just supposed to be a lighthearted comedy, a little somethin’ somethin’ to get your mind off your humdrum day. You know? But the movie was a flop in every way. Probably I was never meant to work in movies. I was meant to walk the path I’m walking. But Vibes really hurt my career, which some people would take in stride, but I couldn’t. And it affected my relationship with Dave as well, because he wasn’t just my boyfriend, he was my manager.

  And while True Colors went to number four on the album charts, the record company wasn’t happy that it only sold three million copies. The title track was a number one single, and “Change of Heart” was number five, and “What’s Going On” went to number twelve. That one didn’t do as well as it should have. When I promoted it on the radio, I said that if Marvin Gaye had a wife who promoted his music like Yoko Ono promoted John Lennon’s we would remember “What’s Going On” as much as we remember “Imagine.” Obviously, that came out more abrasive than I meant it. I always felt that people didn’t care enough about Marvin, because the drugs had taken him over and maybe turned him into a person who wasn’t Marvin anymore. The man could sing and write, though, I can tell you that.

  I had to visit radio stations all over the place and do special events for them. I busted ass, and it cost money to do everything, but they didn’t pay for a thing. I had to do it though—otherwise, I’d be on the shit list. I also had a long list of stations to call, and every fifteen minutes I’d call another one. That would go on for a couple of hours. In the morning, I’d talk to deejays who were trying to be funny because th
eir listeners were just getting up and grumpy. And because some of the deejays had been awake since three A.M., they were grouchy, too, and they would say stupid things because they were winging it. A lot of them had a bug up their ass and were nasty about having to push my album. And because I never had a filter, I’d be nasty back. It was not a great situation. I still call up radio stations, but before I call anybody, I make sure they want to talk to me and I build in some breaks.

  The first “True Colors” tour didn’t sell as well as the “Fun” tour, either. I felt really bad about that, even though a lot of people weren’t selling tickets in the winter of 1986. And on top of that, my accountant told me I couldn’t go into the audiences anymore because I could be sued. So all of a sudden there was a barrier between me, “the star,” and “the people,” and that was the point of seeing me—that there was no barrier.

  I decided that if I couldn’t touch the audience, then I’d try to touch them visually and make colors across the stage. So I wore clothes that had one color on top and layered it with more color underneath. As I swirled, other colors popped out, so I painted as I sang. And I moved more, and I sang my ass off. I tried really hard, but I had the sophomore slump. I remember Jon Pareles of the New York Times did an article comparing me again to Madonna and how I was going to do better than her, and blah blah blah. I didn’t think that was such a good idea because you never know what will happen. And after True Colors, Madonna proved him wrong. She is brilliant at selling, and she didn’t fight her record company the way I did. I think the secret behind her success is that she would find someone who was really successful at what she wanted to do—a writer or a producer—and do it with them. I never did that. I never wanted to call up people I didn’t know. And she also had Warner Bros., and their VP Seymour Stein, behind her fighting the fight with her, and I just didn’t get that kind of support from my label. I was always fighting with them. Even Dave got caught up in the “Madonna rivalry.” One time he said, “Don’t you want to compete with Madonna?” I couldn’t believe it. I was just trying to stay focused and do my own thing.

  Then Don Dempsey, general manager of Epic, was fired, and I was devastated, because I loved him and he was a big supporter of mine. I remember one time in the beginning of my solo career, in 1983, I had to have a promotional dinner in the south of France and I was sitting at the table and didn’t know how to behave. He said, “Eat to the left, drink to the right.” (He also pointed to one of his ears and said, “I’m deaf in this ear, but you’ll notice that sometimes I put people who talk the most on this side, and I just nod.”) I started to get really disillusioned with record companies when he was fired. There was a lot of changeover at Epic because Sony was buying CBS and Epic was under that whole umbrella. In the meantime, Dave Wolff was feeling a lot of pressure to make me successful because now that Don was out and Al Teller was in, everybody had something to say about my career. It was not a great atmosphere.

  They were all trying to control me and I didn’t want everybody telling me “Do this, do that.” I was a little full of myself, too—as we all get when we get famous. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t go out because Dave Wolff was afraid of me being alone, and when I did, I was impatient. I never called before going to restaurants and then I’d get mad if they couldn’t seat me.

  And as my relationship with the record company was getting more tense, things were getting more tense at home. Dave had done a real good job of keeping me isolated. That was his method: Keep Cyndi so busy that she never knows what is going on. Even at the height of my fame, when I would hang out with my friend Katie Valk, it would torture Dave. He would call her and ask, “Are you guys okay? What are you doing now?” He’d make calls like that a lot. For instance, if I was working with people in the studio, he’d call the producer and say, “How did she do today?” As opposed to calling and asking me directly.

  That’s how he controlled me. And that was frustrating because my whole life had been an adventure and now I was trapped like a bird in a cage. I believe that he didn’t mean it in a bad way. But I guess in his mind, I was out of control because I had a vision of what I wanted to look like, sound like, and be like. And as we started to grow apart, there was a power struggle. When I was promoting True Colors on TV, he liked to have me say that we were engaged but that we weren’t going to get married until I was really successful, because he thought it was funny. I went along with the joke but I felt it was very humiliating. Yeah, yeah—the joke’s on me. And it only added to the pressure that he was feeling because of the new crop of muckety-mucks he had to deal with at the record company.

  And there was also tension between Walter Yetnikoff and Al Teller, who was the president of CBS. Lennie felt that Tommy Mottola would be a better fit for us and Sony because he was a manager and he knew artists and he would be more personable. So somehow Dave, Lennie, and Tommy orchestrated this meeting between Walter and Tommy so that they could bond, and hopefully Tommy could take over for Al when Walter got rid of him, which was looking like a possibility. By then, we had had a long history with Tommy. The idea was for all of us to stay at our house on Cape Cod, which I had bought in 1985. It wasn’t that big; it was just a regular house in a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood. It had a dock that I never fixed up, and we got a speedboat that Dave wanted, but he didn’t know how to drive it. (When I got some money I decided to buy some real estate: that house, a little piece of land on Cape Cod, and the downtown apartment in New York.)

  The house wasn’t fixed up, so I had to scramble to do it real quick because everybody was coming in a couple of days. That’s my life: I have these bigwigs and their wives coming over for a big shindig and I’m driving around with the neighbor kid picking up furniture. And all I kept hearing on the radio was U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and I kept thinking, “Yeah, you could say that again. I need a sofa.” I was in such a hurry that I’d just go into a store and say, “I love what’s in your window—can I buy it?”

  Plus my cat Skeezicks kept pissing on the comforter upstairs where Walter was going to sleep and then she disappeared. I found her burrowed into the wall of the house. I should have realized then that if the cat was pissing on the comforter this wasn’t a good idea, but no, I just kept going along, trying to get everything ready for them.

  When everybody showed up, I tried to treat Walter like a regular person. I took him out on the boat and scooted around the bay with him so he could forget about everything for a minute and just be a person.

  Tommy Mottola brought the two little kids he had with his first wife, and when we were on the beach, Lennie’s wife, who was very good with kids, turned around to the one named Michael and said, “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” He said, “I’m going to be my mother’s lawyer.” He was maybe eight years old. I was like, “Okay, I guess things are rocky at home.” By that time, Tommy had discovered Mariah Carey.

  Well, the get-together turned out to be successful because Tommy got the gig at my house. Afterward, I rued the day. You can’t get involved with this shit because these people are very dog-eat-dog. Walter had an idea to separate CBS broadcasting from CBS music but he needed someone to buy the music division from Larry Tisch, the CEO of CBS (he didn’t even like music). Walter wanted to have the Sony executives run things instead and he felt that I would be the perfect person to build up relations with the Sony executives from Japan—working as I did in the Japanese piano bars. So I schmoozed and took a photo with Akio Morita, the cofounder of Sony and inventor of the Sony Walkman, for the cover of Time magazine in 1988 for an article they did. I was being a good soldier. Then as time went on Walter and Tommy had a rift. We sided with Walter, which was a whole big mistake, because after that my life went to shit.

  Tommy never forgot and never forgave what we did for Walter, and when he took over, the word at the label was that my stuff was being put on the back burner and that it wasn’t going to be promoted like it had been. At that point, I should
have walked and contacted Seymour Stein, but he already had his girl. Don Dempsey had really understood the qualities that made me famous, and after that, I had all these knuckleheads come in and tell me things like I should dress like Katrina of Katrina and the Waves. One time I had a meeting with Tommy about my musical direction, and he said, “What records do you like that are on the charts?” I picked out the cool stuff, like what U2 was doing. Then he fuckin’ said I had to work with this other guy who used to be in Canned Heat! And then the head of A & R—Don Grierson, a nice guy, but he didn’t have much of an artistic thing going on—kept trying to make me into Heart. I was like, “I’ve already been in a cover band, thank you very much, and have no intention of doing it again.” Then one of the new heads at Sony turned to me in a meeting and said, “What is that you’re wearing?” I thought to myself, “Are you kidding me?” I should have said, “This is what your daughter is going to wear next year.”

  All of them were trying to remake me after the perceived lack of success of True Colors, and I didn’t want to be remade, I wanted to do what I did. But because they thought they were more important than the artist, they wanted to make the sounds, and I didn’t want to be part of that machine. I wanted out of my contract, but if I sued my label like George Michael did, I would lose, and if I made a record, I’d have to put up with one knucklehead after the other, and I was incredibly frustrated and depressed. Let me tell ya, it was not a good situation.