Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (16 page)

I would always find wacko songs like that and just stick them in the middle of other music we were doing to make Rick laugh. And of course we kept
She’s So Unusual
for the title.

Everything for that album came from my life—even the record cover. I was inspired by a picture that I had seen in a book of photos of South America that my friend Ken Walls had. He worked on Blue Angel’s three videos, and I dated him for a while, and we stayed friends. He always showed me books of art and photography, and one time I found this photograph of a girl standing in the midday sun. She had a colorful skirt and a bouquet of flowers and the sun cast a shadow that was just right. I said that there should be a beach umbrella on the cover photo with me, and it was the art director’s idea to go to Coney Island. We went there (after getting lost) and started walking around,
and I found this one street that had really great color, like in South America, and it was in front of an old wax museum. There was midday sun and that was it: We found the location.

Then I went to Screaming Mimi’s, where I had worked, to pick out my wardrobe. In the shop I had seen this wonderful picture of Jane Russell, a beautiful actress from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
In the photo, she had a blouse that was off the shoulders; espadrilles, which were popular then; and a full green skirt that looked like this red skirt that had come into the store. Her outfit had a whole South American feel. And I had already worn a bathing suit under a big dress when I opened for Peter Frampton in Puerto Rico, so I knew that could work for the top. Laura Wills, who owned the shop and was a genius, helped put together the look. I used to see how stylists would come in and ask Laura to put something together for them, and they’d take the credit. I’d say to her, “When I get my album, you’re going to be named as the stylist.” (Of course, what did I do? I misspelled her name in the first round of credits. I’m such a fuckin’ idiot.)

For the cover shoot, I didn’t have anybody doing my makeup—I did my own. Laura did the styling, but we got Annie Leibovitz to do the shoot. I found the Polaroids recently, which are wild to look at now, especially the one Annie gave me after we figured out the back cover together. I had gessoed my shoes for the shoot. I had been dreaming of my feet in the air with the parachute jump in the background ever since we first went to Coney Island. If you’re from Coney Island, or New York, you recognize that scene immediately. To me, it’s the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn. I didn’t have time to paint so I found a book with prints of van Gogh, my favorite painter. I studied him in school too. I gravitated to the color and broad strokes of his work. I’m also fascinated with the soles of shoes, because when you look at them, you see how a person walks through their life.

So I cut the painting
Starry Night
along the outline of my shoes, so that I had pieces of van Gogh, I had art, on my soles. When I went to art school, I read Vinnie’s letters to his brother, Theo. I kind of wished I could have written Vincent and told him I used his work to make living art of
Starry Night
in a photograph nearly a hundred years after his death and hoped it was okay with him.

For the front cover, I wanted flowers like the girl in the South American picture, and I wanted a chain on my ankle and on my hip, to stress that woman is the slave of the world. Slavery is not just black and white. As I said, for Sicilian women, slavery was a mind fuck, a way to keep them in the house, as domestic slaves and bearing a man’s children. So that chain was very symbolic to me.

I placed the flowers, the shoes, and the umbrella on the ground. And I brought the unfinished tapes from the studio so that I could play the music and dance to it while Annie was shooting. I wanted the sound of the music and the visual to marry, and that was the only way Annie could understand what it was she was taking a picture of.

Annie kept going, “Cyndi, pull your dress up.” I just felt like, “No, I don’t want to do that. I want to do the strong dance art thing.” So I did both, and when it came time to choose the image, the record company was really vying for the one of me holding my dress up with the slip showing. I went around and asked people, “Which one do you like?” The people under thirty liked the strong one, and the people over thirty liked the more passive one. So when I presented it to Lennie, I told him that people under thirty liked the strong one, and I said we should go with that. He did. Lennie allowed me to have some freedom of speech and mind, and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

I’ll tell you something else: I also did nude pictures with Annie. I was always an artist’s model. I thought we were going to make great
art, and some of it was, but I was a pop star and you couldn’t have those kinds of pictures around. (I had them in a drawer; when my kid was born one of my assistants cleared all my pictures away, but I just found them.)

When the album was completed, the label wanted the first single to be “Time After Time.” But I kept saying to them, “Listen to me—releasing a ballad first defines you in a certain way. You become known as a balladeer, and it can kill your career.” Dave Wolff fought for me and kept saying that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” could be an anthem, and finally everyone got excited and agreed it would be the first single.

The album was released in October of 1983. I was about to become famous, and it wasn’t at all what I pictured.

W
HEN IT CAME
time to choose a director for the video of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” I had Edd Griles in mind. I liked how he directed the Blue Angel video “I Had a Love,” which won an International Film & Television of New York Award. And I liked him because he was personable and had a sense of humor (that was so important) and he was visual. For instance, when we shot the “I Had a Love” video, I had this idea of my boyfriend in the video and me watching TV; I’d then go turn the TV set off and my skirt would wipe the screen, wiping you into another scene. Visuals like that always went through my head, and sometimes it was kind of hard to get other people on board, but Edd and I were in sync.

He was open to doing the video, and once he was in, we started having meetings. He had this concept of having all these girls in it, like a Busby Berkeley musical, which I thought would be great. (I didn’t really have time to write a treatment because at the time I was doing so much promotion for the album.)

What Edd did that was so special was that he was open-minded enough to see that the whole video was a creative collective. People in the public eye often see things as “It’s either all me or all them.” That’s
not true. It wasn’t all me or all them: it was us. The video was made with a combination of input from all the creative people on the set—the set designer, the stylists, Edd, my friends, me, and Captain Lou Albano, the wrestler who played my dad. Everyone felt free to contribute. I met Captain Lou when I was in Blue Angel. We were on a plane ride coming back from Puerto Rico. Originally they wanted the wrestler Gorgeous George to be in the video, but I said, “No, Captain Lou’s the one.” I had kept in touch with him and had his number, so Dave called him and he signed up immediately. When I was in Blue Angel I had an idea for a funny radio commercial with the voice of Tom Carvel, the founder of a chain of ice cream stores called Carvel’s. But we couldn’t get him, so we used Arnold Stang for the radio commercial and Captain Lou for the video. The rest became rock and roll history. Lou was sweet, and kind of a rock and roll character, too. The band NRBQ loved him as well. He was so funny. He made all the promotion fun. He was like this wacky big kahuna with his Hawaiian shirts and bushy eyebrows. He was so ahead of the curve.

Edd was not only a really wonderful director but a great teacher as well. He taught me so much. I had very strong ideas about what I thought the video should look like and mainly I was trying to make sure that it moved along with the music. And you don’t shoot a dance scene without showing the feet! I saw that all the time. I asked Edd so many questions during our meetings. “What’s the apartment going to look like? What’s she going to look like? What’s her room going to look like? Because it’s gotta have a certain look.”

The aesthetic I was going for was again Screaming Mimi’s. And of course Laura Wills, the owner, was styling my clothes for the shoot. That store totally inspired me. I shopped all around the city and always went back to Screaming Mimi’s because it had this fun approach to fashion. It had humor, it had wildness, it had sexiness, it had the old-movie
vibe. And I had always felt like I was born in an old movie. To me, the whole Screaming Mimi’s look wasn’t just a style—it was a movement. And it wasn’t just them. There were a whole bunch of people in the city who saw fashion, and home living, like that—reminiscent of the fifties, yet a Jackson Pollock thing, and that modern, cutting-edge thing where you mix elements together that would never have been mixed together in that time. When we did this video, the style that we presented was current but still underground. That look was really hot in New York and in England, but it was not big in middle America.

I started working with the art director—the guy who was doing the furniture and stuff. I wanted the kitchen to be very fifties. We couldn’t really afford wallpaper—it was really a low-budget shoot—so I brought in a tablecloth from Screaming Mimi’s that had a pattern I liked, and the art director kind of painted the walls like that. I also found furniture for the bedroom and painted it with bright paint. I wish I could find that furniture now. I think it’s in storage.

I really saw my work as a kind of social movement, and not just when it came to the visuals. When I asked my mom to be in the video, I said, “Mom, think of what this could mean if you’re involved—then you and I will make it popular to be friends with your mom.” I told her we couldn’t afford to pay a bunch of extras, and she said, “Of course I’ll help you, Cyndi. What do you want me to do? I’m not really an actress.” I said, “Ma, we’re gonna play together, that’s all.” So Laura dressed her up, and they fixed her hair up, put a little makeup on her. On the set, she sat at the kitchen table and she didn’t know what to do. Edd said, “Maybe when you’re at the table cracking eggs, you should take the egg and slap it on your chest, like you’re doing a mea culpa.” So after I come in and sing, “We’re not the fortunate ones,” she takes the egg and breaks it on her chest like Edd said and then realizes it’s there. That’s all she needed to do.

My mother was frightened to death of Captain Lou. When he was talking to her during the shoot, he was really getting in her face, and you could see her sort of backed up against the wall, but it was so funny. My mom is such a good sport. She even came to work at the age of eighty on
The Celebrity Apprentice.
There was something about her on film that was so vulnerable. She wasn’t an actress, but she had this charming presence that was so endearing. I know this is my mother, but she looked like she was from an Italian film, or the woman from the 1950s French film
Mon Oncle.

We shot it in the summer at a place called Mother’s, a studio in the East Village. Again, we didn’t have a big budget so we all opened up our closets and shared all our clothes, and we got a whole bunch of my friends and family to be in the video. They’re all in it except my sister, Elen, who was in LA, and my cousin Vinny. Everyone’s generosity is what got the video made. We were all in this together. My videos became almost like home movies of my friends and family. I remember we got all the beauticians from Vidal Sassoon to be in it, too. Not Vidal himself, but everybody else joined in, including this really talented guy named Justin Ware, who did my hair for the shoot. I knew everybody at Vidal Sassoon because I was a hair model there for the longest time. In 1975 or ’76, it was the cutting-edge place, and they would do demonstrations on my hair. Everyone was doing all kinds of wild and creative things at that time and had absolutely amazing hair. You’d come in and somebody had hair dyed like a tabby cat, and you’d say, “Man, that’s fuckin’ awesome—how did they do that?” The hairstyles were art pieces. As you could imagine, there was a lot of experimentation done on my hair. In the seventies I had a Suzi Quatro kind of haircut, and it was brown, and then they went with red in the back and blond in the front. I loved it.

They looked forward to rock and rollers like me who wanted experimental haircuts. They’d discuss it with you and say, “How about we dye it black just on the last few inches?” and you’d go, “Yeah, yeah, that’s good.” I once told Justin to cut my hair short on one side and gradually long on the other, because there was a picture of Mamie Van Doren on the wall at Screaming Mimi’s, with her hair pinned to one side. I thought, “Why pin it when you can just cut it?”

So we had the beauticians from Vidal Sassoon, some secretaries from Epic, the girls from Laura’s shop, Myra from the Japanese place where I had worked, and this black girl we cast who looked awesome with her dreads. It was very important to me that every girl was represented—Hispanic girls, African-American girls. I told Edd that we had to have multiracial people too. At that time, everybody who was in videos was either all white or all black. I figured, “You know what? Here’s what I see missing. Let’s go for it.” There still wasn’t as much integration as there should have been, but I feel like a lot of little girls who saw the video saw themselves, and that was the most important thing. As long as I got to them, I didn’t care anymore.

So many people showed up for that shoot! It was extraordinary. My brother, Butch, played the pizza-delivery guy. Joe Zynsczak, who was my manager along with Dave, was the waiter in the bedroom. I had a friend named Bonnie Ross who was a nurse, and she was there dressed up in her uniform. (Bonnie was a direct descendant of Betsy Ross and used to tell me there was this horrible feeling in her family that Betsy might have slept with George Washington to get the gig.) You know the man with the handlebar mustache? That was my lawyer, Elliot Hoffman. Edd said, “How about getting Steve Forbert to be your boyfriend?” I said, “I love Steve Forbert.” So there’s Steve Forbert holding flowers. They’re all in that fuckin’ room.