Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

by Lauper, Cyndi

  There was a mix of well-known acts and then Italian acts that I didn’t know, which was fantastic. I traveled to the show with Justin, my hair person, because I was going to be on TV. Justin had a beard and long hair down to his butt. Then there was Jodi, my makeup artist, who was tiny, and Laura Wills, too, who was five foot ten, and Dave. And me, I was right in the middle. The car was stuffed so full with all the luggage and the crap that we needed for the television show that the trunk wouldn’t close and we had to use rope. So when we arrived at the festival there were kids waiting around and screaming as each artist emerged from their car. When we all got out the kids started singing the Addams Family theme! I laughed so hard. I could not believe that this was happening in Bari. I thought, “We do look like the Addams family.”

  Then a little Italian kid ran up to Laura Wills, looked her right in the face, stamped on her foot as hard as he could, and ran away. They were out of their minds. We just started laughing all the time because our lives were so ridiculous. After we did the TV show, we were brought to this restaurant where all the Sony artists from all over the world were. The Italian artists were sitting on the left and they started singing as the waiters brought out this incredible food. Then everybody started drinking and singing. I listened to this guy, Massimo, from the record company talk, and he said, “In the seventies, we had the Beatles and the Stones, and now we have Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet.” And I kept thinking, “I don’t think so. Those aren’t the new legends.”

  There were other artists from Australia there called Noiseworks, and they started playing, and we started playing, too, and I just fell in love with what was going on—eating, drinking, and singing. So I started singing with them—harmonies, whatever I could. Then the place went a little loony. They were pouring vodka around, and I found myself on a chair at the end of the night singing “True Colors” with the singer from Noiseworks and the dishwasher, who was playing harmonica. I thought, “What the heck—this is great. This is what it’s about, this is rock and roll at its finest.” It was well worth the trip. In that moment, the joy came back to the music for me.

  I always had fun in Italy. The first time I went there I had to go on another Italian TV show to perform “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which, if I remember correctly, was a lip-sync. Before I went on, I was telling a producer that my family came from Sicily. He was Sicilian, so that was a big thing. And then I heard a chicken.

  “Excuse me—is that a chicken?” I asked.

  “Yes, that was a chicken.”

  “Let me get this straight. I’m opening for the chicken?”

  “Yeah, you are,” he said.

  Hey, why not? That was crazy European television. (When I was promoting Hat Full of Stars there, some sheep opened for me, but they peed on the monitors, which wasn’t a good thing.)

  Another time I went on French TV to sing “I Drove All Night,” and I wanted to do a performance-art piece where a car driving along a road is projected onto my naked body, like in the video. So I worked with this lighting woman Carol, who recommended that I get this stretchy, reflective material to wrap around my body. We couldn’t get the fucking projector to work though, and my tour manager, Robin, started sweating profusely because it was live TV and we had to go on soon. And these fifteen French guys were standing around the projector, smoking cigarettes and speaking French, trying to make the thing work. At that time Simply Red had that rendition of the song “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” and Jodi kept singing, “If it ain’t working by now, it ain’t never gonna work.” I was laughing, thinking, “Oh, my God.” The clock was ticking and finally Robin just pressed a button and it worked. I thought, “Ohhh, the on/off button. Excellent.” Things like that happened so often. Hey, as long as I could make an art piece, I was happy.

  The “Night to Remember” tour took me to many places, including all through Mexico, which I loved. The only problem was that I was playing in bullrings, and I kept losing my voice. I realized that I was sucking in the dirt that was being kicked up from the dirt floor as everyone got excited and started to dance. Once we figured that out we got a fan to blow the dust away from me. I got sick in Hong Kong too because of the air-conditioning (they didn’t always clean the filters) and I got bronchitis. It was so bad I had to cancel dates, and then I went to Australia and the Philippines and sang the best I could, with me having bronchitis. In Japan I took every vitamin known to man and started getting better. (And I started to have an affair with another guy, a really handsome Australian journalist who interviewed me. I had no clue that he was going to hit on me. I kept talking and talking and talking about my art, and finally he just picked me up and headed to the bedroom and I said, “Oh.”)

  I started wondering if maybe I should stay in Australia and make my next record. It would mean leaving everyone I had worked with for eight years to make music. But at least it would be a fresh start. Noiseworks was there, and maybe I could do some work with them. It could be fun. I stood at Bondi Beach looking out at the end of the earth. I realized I might be very lonely. I would be really far away from everything I knew. I had done it once before in my life, but I wasn’t sure I was up for it again. And I wasn’t sure I could make the kind of record I wanted in Australia. Plus, I couldn’t drive. I’m a New Yorker and I never got my license. So I returned to New York. But I always wonder what my music might have been like if I’d stayed.

  I had been away for three months, and when I got home it was near Christmastime. I had shopped and shopped for all the presents. Dave came over and packed them all up in his car so we could go visit Lennie and give everyone their gifts. He and I almost reconciled before we left. We made love and then went down to the car, which he left parked in front of the building with all the presents stacked up to the roof. Of course someone broke in and stole them. What a surprise! And what might my old friend Aesop have had to say about that? “Don’t be lame and leave the fuckin’ car filled with presents for people who might want to steal them!”

  I was worn out from touring, when I got an offer to do another movie. I had gotten a couple of other offers before then—for Steel Magnolias and Working Girl. No one explained to me that it would be a good idea to work with Mike Nichols but I didn’t want to do Working Girl because I couldn’t stand to be in an office again, and I didn’t want to play a beautician again. Then I turned down Steel Magnolias because I didn’t think I’d be good enough.

  But I decided to take the role in Paradise Paved, which was then changed to Moon over Miami—which was then changed to Off and Running. But it never really got off and running. It was the last film Orion Pictures made before it filed for bankruptcy in 1991. Here’s the thing: Whenever a project has three names, you know it’s not going to work. But I thought, “Let’s stop with the music for a while and do a movie.” It was another crazy-girl story, a quirky film that tried to be serious, too. Vibes had a better premise. I played an actress named Cyd Morse who wasn’t getting much work so I danced as an underwater mermaid at a Miami night club. Then I got caught up in a murder mystery after two guys killed my boyfriend and tried to kill me too. It was supposed to be like a dark screwball-comedy thing. But it was another sexist set, and in my opinion, I felt the director was overwhelmed. And after a while I felt like I was in a boys’ club. And once again, I never felt like I could talk to anyone except my acting coach.

  My new acting coach was into the whole “Method acting” thing, which I could never grasp. She gave me all these exercises, like jumping up and down on one foot while singing “Happy Birthday” out of time. I felt tortured during that. I’m a singer/musician. Repetitively saying words over and over again in a scene helped me find the rhythm of it. For me, everything is rhythm. We have a heart, we have a pulse, we have brain waves. We are rhythm. Once I hear the rhythm of a person’s speech, then I learn the person who is behind it. That’s what I understood. The other stuff I didn’t get. I always was trying to figure out what the scene was about, but I didn’t know how, and I couldn�
��t understand what they were telling me. I was told not to behave like myself. They would say, “You’ll need to talk lower, and don’t use your hands when you talk.” So I tried my best, but the “why” was missing. I was just desperately trying to please everybody after being dragged over the coals in Vibes.

  Louis Falco, the movie’s choreographer, became a good friend. He had a dance company in New York and I went to see him when he was choreographing the underwater scenes. He said, “Cyn, you have to undulate.” Undulate? What the hell is that? Then he saw me trying to undulate and said, “Uh, never mind, that’s okay.” Then when we actually did it in the water, he told me to twirl around, and I twirled around and twirled around like a drill, until I hit my head on the wall of the pool. Again, he said, “Uh, never mind.” I also had to learn how to swim. I don’t like to get my face wet so it was kind of difficult. Then I had to learn how to scuba dive. Sometimes I would freak out, and the swimming teacher would say, “If you freak out, rest, become really calm, remember that you can breathe, and think, ‘What am I afraid of?’” I still use that now when I freak out—as long as I can breathe, I can remain calm.

  The costume designer liked the whiteness of my skin and wanted me to have black hair in the pool to make me look different from the other mermaids. Then they decided I’d have a black top too. But the black top did something strange to the underwater visual: It sucked all the light in. All the other mermaids had on light-colored tops that made their breasts look even bigger than they were—not that they weren’t built like brick shit houses in the first place. But my black top made my breasts look smaller, so that I looked like a twelve-year-old. Just before I went into the water, the guy who worked for the producer came running over to me and started yelling about the costume. I said to him, “Why are you yelling at me? Is this the first time you looked at my costume? Why didn’t you check it before? I’m petrified of the water, and now that I’m about to get in, you’re stressing me out?” Everybody was freaked out because by the time I got to the end of the conversation, I was yelling.

  After I went into the water a bunch of times, I realized that not only could I work the air pipe and breathe by filtering the water with my tongue, but I could also lip-sync. All of a sudden, I was performing underwater. Not for nothing, but I was like Flipper. Who knew you could lip-sync underwater? That was fun. At first, they had a stuntwoman doing some of the underwater shots but the director felt I had more personality. The frustrating thing was that after all that work learning how to do this, they only filmed a little bit of the song. They didn’t even do one complete take. If they filmed the whole song, even just once, then we could have created a video with clips of the movie in it. Which I thought might have been why I was cast, so that they could have cross-promotion in two different worlds, music and film.

  While I was shooting that movie, I found out I was nominated for another Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance in “I Drove All Night.” The funny thing was, when we were compiling that CD, I told Don Grierson “I Drove All Night” should be the first cut on the album, because this song would be nominated for a Grammy. I remember how he looked at me like I was a bit delusional. But this time, I was going against Bonnie Raitt’s comeback and she won for “Nick of Time.” (Like I said, the first time I was nominated for best vocal, I lost to Tina Turner’s comeback. The second time, with “True Colors,” I lost to Barbra Streisand’s comeback. The problem with me is that I either keep coming back or I don’t go away . . . I’m not sure which one it is.)

  The producer of the film would not allow me to take a day off to go to the Grammys. It was just a really difficult time. I felt really beaten down. But then my assistant, Paul, who was on the set with me, kept saying, “You gotta meet this guy David Thornton—he plays the murderer. He’s really funny. I can’t tell if he’s straight or gay but God, is he cute.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DAVID, DAVID, DAVID: that was all Paul kept talking about, because he had a crush on him. (“If he’s gay, then he’s my new boyfriend,” he said.) Then he did some investigating and found out that David had a girlfriend, but he didn’t get a vibe that things were goin’ good. So when we were going to dinner one night and Off and Running did not supply any transportation for David, I said, “Maybe we should call the murderer and see if he wants to come with us.”

  During filming, I didn’t want to stay in the fancy hotel in Miami Beach with my costar David Keith and the director. The room was on the water, but it didn’t even have a view. So I asked if I could stay at the nearby Eden Roc, where I could have a nice, big penthouse with a patio and a beautiful view for less than the cost of the room they got me, and they said yes. The only problem was that sometimes I found palmetto bugs in my room. Ya ever seen a palmetto bug? Their faces are so big, you could still see the expressions on them when they keeled over. (I said that once in the elevator, and the manager was there too and he got mad because I said it in front of some guests.)

  When David Thornton came up to meet me, he did a really silly thing. He pulled his pants all the way up like Urkel and shook my hand with rounded shoulders and said, “Nice to meet you.” So I knew he was funny. We started hanging out in a little group with Paul and Louis and Marilyn, my acting coach, and I really loved our times off the set together. David is this fuckin’ sensational actor (he went to the Yale School of Drama), very creative, and also very sweet.

  When we all did our first script reading together, we went through a scene where my boyfriend lets this room-service guy (who was played by David) into our room and he karate-kicks my boyfriend out the window and kills him. After the reading, I called up David’s room and said, “Listen, pal, not for nothin’, but don’t you be kickin’ my boyfriend like that. I’m going to tell him not to answer the door.” And I hung up. After that, he started to send notes to Paul that were supposedly from Madonna, telling him that he should go work for her instead because he wouldn’t have to taste her food like he had to do with me. He wrote all this funny stuff, and then it was on. One time I was out with Marilyn and I took all the shrimp tails from my dish and stapled them to the bottom of a piece of paper. We got into it and we were both laughing. Then I cut out letters from the newspaper and glued them to spell out, “Dear murderer, please don’t kill me—from the mermaid.” Then I put that by his door.

  Back and forth, back and forth went these practical jokes, which were so hilariously funny. Then I found another crazy letter in my dressing room—only this one wasn’t so crazy. It was written just before the first day of shooting, and it said that I had all the beauty and knowledge within me to do this. How generous was David to say that to me? Louis was reading it, and he turned around and said, “Cyn, you know what this is?” I said, “Yeah, it’s a card.” He goes, “No. It’s a love letter.”

  I was the one who made the director hire him in the first place. I sat in on all the auditions because I was supposed to be involved; we were all going to be a team. We saw all these guys who wanted to play the murderer, and then this one guy came in who was so intense that he scared the script reader so much that she just dropped the paper. I looked at him and thought, “Yeah, he’s a little good-lookin’, but isn’t that what makes a murderer really menacing?” His energy just filled the stage. I looked at the director and said, “You know, it’s that guy, what’s-his-name.” The director pulled out his headshot and said, “No, he’s too good-looking.” I said, “Listen, you can always make a person look ugly. But you can’t make an ugly guy act good, the way this guy can. It gives the story weight.”

  Unfortunately, David Keith, who was to play the lead male role, was going through a rough time in his life, I think. He just didn’t seem to be himself, because before I worked with him, I met a musician who knew him who said he was nice. But he wasn’t so nice during filming. Like, I’d be soaking wet after a scene and he’d take the portable air-conditioning unit and put it right by me. And I found it abusive that he made the kid in the movie cry. The kid was really a
great little actor, and instead of continuing to act after that movie, I think he went to military school and then into the army.

  This was my second film and it had the same strange atmosphere as my first one. I could never seem to get away with an easy set. And I never found a way to shut out the people who were trying to distract me on purpose. It’s like, where are the fuckin’ rules of etiquette on a film set? I did that movie to get away from the tumultuous changing of the guard at the record company and all those corporate heads who wanted to put their stamp on me and wanted to be the celebrities instead of the artists being the celebrities.

  So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to go to Miami, and I’m going to live these pages for the next few months. I’m not Cyn anymore, I’m Cyd. I’m not a blonde anymore. I’m going to do something different.” And when the director told me to dye my hair black like Louise Brooks, I jumped. But when the producer saw it, he flipped out, so I put an orange glaze over it so it would seem dark brown.

  Then I started filming and realized what a pain in the ass it was to be with those people. The movie actually had a good script, but like I said, I felt the director was overwhelmed. He’d yell on set, and then if we looked upset he’d go, “Come on, everyone, this is a comedy! What’s wrong?” He reminded me of actor Eugene Levy in one of those old Second City Television skits. I’d think, “This can’t really be my life, can it? Is it always gonna be a comedy of errors?”