Cyndi Lauper at 70: ‘I’m still here, I’m gonna get to tell my own story’

This story is part of the May 5 edition of Sunday Life.See all 13 stories.

Cyndi Lauper, 70, is by her own admission “a grafter, a show-upper”. That imperial run of early hits – among them Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time, She Bop, True Colors and I Drove All Night – ensure that, even now, she remains one of Spotify’s 500 most-streamed artists.

In America, her reinvention as a major Broadway player with the multiple Tony award-winning musical Kinky Boots – for which she wrote the music and lyrics – means that her stock is high. She’s “very, very close” to completing work on a second musical, a long-awaited adaptation of Working Girl, and a worldwide release for Let the Canary Sing, a feature-length documentary about her life, is also due this year.

Her hair, a candyfloss swirl that sits above her shoulders, is a world away from the hot-orange hairdo she wore when Girls Just Want to Have Fun vaulted her to superstardom. Her brightly coloured silk Basquiat blouse probably cost more than the entire outfit she wore in that video. But the combination of that narrowed gaze, like she’s constantly sizing you up, and the fact that she still says “because” as though there’s a “q” in the middle of it, is the tell.

Lauper’s earliest memories growing up in Queens seem to bounce between two incompatible value systems. At one extreme, there was that of her Sicilian grandmother, who believed that “only whores go to school in Manhattan” and whose favourite TV show was Queen for a Day, in which housewives competed to win, say, a vacuum cleaner “that you’d be given at the same time as they put a crown on you”. Lauper remembers seeing her grandmother cry as she watched tears streaming down the winner’s face, and thinking, “I’d cry, too, if they put a crown on my head and made me vacuum. I mean, I didn’t know the word ‘disenfranchised’, but I sure as hell knew what it meant.”

At the other extreme, her art-loving mother, Catrine, listened to Debussy and Leonard Bernstein’s version of Peter and the Wolf. In her self-titled memoir, published in 2012, Lauper depicts herself as a mute witness to her mother’s frustrated aspirations. Young Cynthia (as she was then) is powerless to help as her parents divorce and her new stepfather’s everyday acts of violence push Catrine further from the bohemian life she dreamt about.

“I was such a dork. When electric typewriters came in, I was toast. My boss liked me, but I was the worst gal Friday she ever had.”

CYNDI LAUPER

Aged 17, Lauper sees her stepdad giggling lasciviously at her naked body through a hole in the frosted glass – a hole left there by the impact of her mother’s wedding ring when he threw her into the door during an earlier fight.

That was also the week she left home, with a bag of belongings and a guitar: “I was afraid of life and I didn’t know why I was born.” With a repertoire of two Joni Mitchell songs – Carey and This Flight Tonight – she’d go busking. Her second album, True Colors, has a dedication to one passerby who gave her two $1 bills: “One for now and one for when you make your second album.”

If you see photos of Lauper at this time, it isn’t hard to understand the compulsion of strangers to show her kindness. “I looked like a frightened kid,” she says, trying to reason why she was employed as a girl Friday at Simon & Schuster when she had no aptitude for the secretarial skills needed for the work. “I was such a dork. I didn’t know what the f--- I was doing.” She fell asleep reading the mail, persistently failed to locate important files and, finally, “when electric typewriters came in, I was toast. My boss liked me, but I was the worst gal Friday she ever had.”

She briefly moved in with her big sister Ellen in Long Island and learnt that if you helped clean the local Hare Krishna temple, you were fed in return. They offered to find a husband for her, but as a woman she’d have to eat in the kitchen with the children after she served the men. Her response? “Listen, I’m Italian and I already know this story about women as chattels. I don’t do that shit any more.”

She moved in with a guy called Phil – 24 to her 18 – who espoused free love. She cooked him adzuki beans and shrimp with miso, but he preferred meat and potatoes. The penny dropped when she picked up her guitar to sing and he told her, “There are so many people who want to do the same thing, and somebody’s got to clean the fish.”

For Lauper, the first vindication of her songwriting talent came when her first US chart-topper, Time After Time.Credit: ERIC BROMS / HEADPRESS

Five years later, with another boyfriend, she got pregnant. Prolonged bleeding followed an abortion; she went to the clinic and when she complained that the examination was painful, the junior doctor standing over her replied, “Well, why didn’t you keep your legs closed in the first place?”

Turns out that there was a word for what she was, but she only realised when she read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. Ono’s “event scores” – instructions which became art when undertaken by the participant – turbocharged Lauper’s desire to figure out what sort of artist she could be and inspired the title of her 1993 album Hat Full of Stars.

By becoming a life model at Johnson State College, a liberal arts institution in Vermont, Lauper was able to study there, too. Asked what she thought about as she posed, she says, “I thought about the angles and the shape of my body, and I listened closely to what the teacher was telling them.”

While at Vermont, she also went down as the first female streaker on campus. Seeking to hide her identity, she pulled her hat over her face and ran through the cafeteria, only for one of the students to tell her, “Cyn, I couldn’t help but recognise you because I draw you all the time.”

She joined her first group, singing backing vocals in a covers band, with modest aspirations. But when their manager suggested a reshuffle that resulted in Lauper taking the lead vocal, what ensued was an unspeakably awful “punishment” meted out at a band member’s house following a show. Leaving a box of vibrators out on display, the group’s bassist and his girlfriend told her to pick one at random, before grabbing her, forcibly pulling her underwear off and assaulting her with it.

Lauper reflects upon the incident. “What struck me was, ‘Why?’ And I realised, ‘Well, it must be about power.’ Then I asked his girlfriend why she helped, and she said, ‘Because I love him.’ Years later, when I was famous, I bumped into him when I was Christmas shopping in Bloomingdale’s. He said, ‘Wow, Cyn, you really did it.’ I didn’t say anything. He’s since passed away.”

Lauper wished her youngest self could have realised how pretty she looked. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re not even ugly! You look good!’”

Asked why she didn’t leave the band at this point, Lauper says it was never an option. “I was like, ‘Really? Really? No, I’m not going anywhere. That’s not what you’re going to do to me.’ What I didn’t realise was that I could have left and it would eventually have been fine.”

Lauper certainly realised that a decade later, on the January evening a limo took her straight from the American Music Awards to the all-night recording of USA for Africa’s star-studded famine-relief song We Are the World. When she recently watched the Netflix documentary Greatest Night in Pop, which chronicles the events of that evening, she wished her youngest self could have realised how pretty she looked. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re not even ugly! You look good!’”

In the preceding two years, her previous band, Blue Angel, had broken up after one album, but not before her magnetic stage presence alerted every major label in America to her existence. For her part, Lauper wasn’t always so impressed by their overtures. Visiting the office of Tommy Mottola, the Sony executive who would later sign and marry Mariah Carey, she noticed that it was festooned with hunting trophies. Lauper remembers her response: “He collects things and I don’t think I want to be part of his collection.”

Clocking the rise of MTV, she chose her label, Portrait, because they promised her a video budget. And although discouraged from writing her own material, she chose cleverly. Girls Just Want to Have Fun was originally a frat-party new wave track by the US songwriter Robert Hazard, written from the perspective of a man in no hurry to commit because “these girls just wanna have fun”.

By removing one word – “these” – Lauper flipped the entire meaning of the song, turning it into a feminist rallying cry. Long separated from Lauper’s stepdad, that’s her mum you can see in the video along with all of Lauper’s female friends at the time. Released at the same time, her debut album, She’s So Unusual, went on to sell seven million copies in America alone.

But for Lauper, the first vindication of her songwriting talent came when her first US chart-topper, Time After Time, a last-minute addition to the album, became one of four songs by pop artists covered by Miles Davis in that decade (the others were by Michael Jackson, Toto and Scritti Politti). Of Davis’s version, she says, “That was a big deal for me. Yet I was always afraid to let him know that I was part of it because most of the older musicians were frightened of me.”

Does she really believe that? “Oh yeah. For sure. If you’re a female and you’re like, ‘Girls just wanna have fun,’ and you’re talking about women’s rights, when they see you coming they get scared. And they did.”

By way of example, Lauper cites her encounter with Bob Dylan at the 2011 Grammys, when she went to shake his hand and he told her, “I don’t like chicks in bands.” Lauper shrugs at the recollection, like it’s old news.

At times, you wonder if Lauper keeps a ledger of ill-fated episodes with famous men. In 1985, she and Steven Spielberg met to discuss The Goonies, the adventure comedy for which he had co-written the story. If she could come up with a song, he would direct the video. “Streisand sang to me once,” he told her, before suggesting she sing in front of a green screen, with him projecting an old film onto it.

“Mr Spielberg,” she replied, “I travelled all the way out here because I wanted to work with a Hollywood director. Can we do something a little more creative?”

At which point, the man whose last two credits were Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Color Purple got up and – presumably in disbelief – said, “I think I was told I wasn’t very creative.” He promptly delegated the job to The Goonies’ director, Richard Donner.

As for her role opposite Jeff Goldblum in Vibes, well, that was notable for its lack of them. His “process” merely left Lauper bewildered. “Before each scene, he’d read each passage as though he were having some kind of breakdown. I said to him, ‘I respect it, but do me a favour: take a f---ing walk, then when it’s time to do the scene, come back here.’”

“Could I see what was coming? The fake news? The insurgency? No, I didn’t see that coming. I just saw an actor and a guy who had a big personality that he used on TV, you know…”

CYNDI LAUPER

It was on her next film, Off and Running, that she met her husband. Fans got to see her and David Thornton up close when Lauper starred in her own reality vehicle, Still So Unusual. The show ran for one season before Thornton’s visible discomfort nixed any further episodes. Her face softens as she talks about him. “He was a proper actor. He had studied drama in Yale. He didn’t need this shit.”

Lauper’s other reality TV experiment, on The Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump, is another bag of bittersweet recollections. In her memoir she wrote, “Not only was he nice to me, he was nice to other people and his kids were good and hardworking.”

Interviewed by Ellen DeGeneres in 2010, she hymned Trump’s charisma, likening his presence to that of an ageing Teddy boy. Reminded about those remarks, she pivots to a defence of her participation in the show, pointing out that she was there to raise money for her True Colors United charity, which offers support to young homeless LGBTQ+ people.

It’s fair to say that Lauper no longer sees Trump as a gold pompadour with a heart to match. “Could I see what was coming? The fake news? The insurgency? No, I didn’t see that coming. I just saw an actor and a guy who had a big personality that he used on TV, you know…”

Lately, she says she’s noticed a change in the tone of the discourse about her. Soon after the launch of Kinky Boots, she had one interviewer ask her, “So how does it feel when you put out new music and nobody wants to hear it on the radio?” Her response? “Feels pretty good because they’re coming to hear my new music on Broadway.”

And, of course, there’s now an entire generation of female singers who triumphantly foreground their “kookiness”, just as Lauper did in the ’80s. There’s Nicki Minaj, who sampled Girls Just Want to Have Fun on her song Pink Friday Girls. Then there’s Lady Gaga, who did a photoshoot with Lauper for M.A.C cosmetics. When the older singer exclaimed, “Oh my God, I used to dance like that, too,” Gaga replied, “I know. I saw you!”

Perhaps because of all this, breakfast-news anchors and DJs have recently tended to favour the term “pop icon” over celebrity. And when it happens, Lauper gently tells them where to stick it. “Pop icon? It’s a trap,” she contends, “because when they call you that, they want to keep you there.” She thrusts the flat of her hand at me. “But as long as I’m still here, I’m gonna get to tell my own story.”

Well, it’s a good story, I tell her. You certainly should.

“Thank you. But it’s not finished.” She rises and, as she does so, brushes shards of crispbread off her silk Basquiat blouse. In the imperious manner, it has to be said, of a bona fide pop icon.

The Times Magazine / News Licensing

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