Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (17 page)

The shoot took place over one long day that turned into a party. We got up really early for our first shot at the Metropolitan Museum. We stood in front of the fountain because it was supposed to look like a Busby Berkeley production. So all of us were lined up, Francis the cameraman used a Steadicam that he owned, and I took all my sunglasses that I had gotten at Screaming Mimi’s over the years and handed them out, so everybody put on a pair. So that’s the shot. And I was happy because everyone looked young and kind of hip. I brought all my makeup to the shoot, too, and ended up getting pinkeye because all of us shared everything.

Even my dog is in the beginning of the video—Rick Chertoff is walking him as I’m dancing down the street. For that part, I was inspired by a scene in this Sophia Loren movie where she comes dancing down the street in Naples in the fuckin’ early morning light with her shoes slung over her shoulder. Then I had to go find the right street. I went down to the West Village, where there would be cobblestone streets, like in the movie, and I found this one street that had a great depth of field because it curved around. It’s called Gay Street, oddly enough.

And then, for a scene later in the video, Edd told me to lead everyone down the street. I said, “What am I supposed to do, the can-can?” (Funny, I kind of did do a can-can.) It was me and this kind of motley crew. I mean, the girls were pretty, but it was still motley even though we took a glamorous approach to the whole thing. You had all these radical girls behaving like they’re America’s sweethearts in the Ziegfeld Follies. Edd said, “Keep leading everyone through the city until you get home, and then your poor mother has to deal with all these people traipsing through to get to your room.” It would be like the Marx Brothers film
A Night at the Opera,
where everybody keeps coming into the room, until Captain Lou opens the door and they all
fall out—which I think was Dave Wolff’s idea. Or was it Edd’s? Or it might have been Dave’s friend Johann, who was also in the video. Dave had his own language and he called his friend Johann Von Bep Bep. His first name was really Johann, but I have no idea what his real last name was.

After we finished shooting, Edd was kind enough to allow me to be a part of the editing, which I really wanted to do. So he showed me the first edit and I said, “Wait a minute—where’s all the other shots? They’re not in here.” He told me that the editor, Pam, had cut some scenes, but if I wanted to add or change things, I should go in with her and get them. I have a good visual memory (especially with clothes) and I busted my ass to do certain things. So I was literally sitting with Pam and pulling out strips of film from a bin. I changed a few shots around with her, and all of a sudden it was moving better and Edd said, “I think you should stay in here with her.” So all of a sudden, I was learning editing. I only did it because I wanted my video to move the way it should move, because it was about music—and I know music.

Edd was looking to get in some kind of special effect, so at the special effects studio at Broadway Video they showed me a technique where you take a photograph and kind of wrap it in a ball. I was under the impression that each girl would be in her own ball—again, kind of a Busby Berkeley effect. But that was not the effect—we only had a certain amount of money, so they were going to do dots of random shots. So I said, “What the hell can this ball do? Can it bounce? How much does that cost?” He said it would cost the same, so then he bounced it and I said, “Bounce it to the time of the music.”

We didn’t have the budget to really do the kind of thing that Busby Berkeley would do—we would have had to have a crane over us to film from above while we all lay down on the floor and moved the way they did in those musicals. Which is what Macy Gray did in
her video for “Beauty in the World”—they were all in a circle holding up pink circles and she’s in the middle. That’s a very strong visual. But you also have to figure out that kind of thing in advance, and we were kind of in a rush.

I did love the part in the video when the silent-movie version of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
is playing and I’m singing, “Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away . . . ,” and of course it’s Quasimodo, taking Esmeralda away to the tower at the exact same time, which is very funny. And the way it was edited, it looked like Quasimodo was waving his arm to the beat and singing the song, too, which was even funnier.

There were so many bits and pieces in there of different things that influenced me. When I pick up the phone backward and then turn it around, it’s because I had seen a David Bowie piece somewhere, where he had a phone receiver upside down and then put it right-side up. I thought, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” And I love the French filmmaker Jacques Tati (if you don’t know about him you should rent
Mon Oncle
or
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
), so there are elements of his style in there as well. I used to watch channel 13 a lot, the public TV station in New York, because I loved old films and they showed a lot of them, like
Mon Oncle.
And because I was an art student, I knew about studying the masters. You need to know what was, before you know what can be.

People think “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was a big hit right away, but it wasn’t. MTV played it a little at first, but not much. When it went to radio, it only got seven adds in two weeks, meaning only seven radio stations played it in the whole country. I got a letter from a powerful national radio programmer who said that the record would never be big because I sang too high. He offered to have me and Dave come see him so we could discuss my career options. But Dave
looked at the letter and decided to cook up a different idea. He said, “This is what we’re going to do: We’re going to start to go to wrestling shows. I’m going to call this guy Vince McMahon and propose a cross-promotion, and we’ll start by doing stuff with Captain Lou.” And that’s how my record really broke.

It was Dave’s dream to do something like this. I mean, this was the guy who set up press meetings in that ridiculous way when he did the whole Human Fly thing, using a horrible French-Canadian accent. Dave really was a pioneer of cross-promotion. Here’s how he explained it to me: There were three wrestling shows every weekend, Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday night. If you had your music videos on all three of those shows, which had big numbers, lots of people would see them. So I said okay.

So then publicity photos started coming out of me and Dave at wrestling matches cheering on the wrestlers and booing the bad guys. And they showed parts of my video before commercial breaks. But he also thought up these on-air scenarios with Captain Lou and me that were played during the show.

You know how those sixties beach movies had all these ridiculous comical characters—like in the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello teen movies where there was a biker named Eric Von Zipper? And the straight people in the movie would be in there going, “Who the heck are these people?” Well, those comical characters were very influential in everything I did. So along with Captain Lou and the wrestlers, I had my mother become a character and dressed her up like this eccentric, sexy, kooky woman with pointy sunglasses and a Chinese robe, and a long cigarette holder and foo-foo shoes with cha-cha heels and pedal pushers.

I thought we should start doing stuff like that because it was funny, and because every time you saw artists, they would try and tell
you about their work and their music and basically it can be boring as shit. Just like when I sit there and try and explain my work—it’s probably so fucking boring. What’s important is the end result: Is it entertaining? So I thought, how hilarious would it be if my “spiritual adviser” Captain Lou, as this big fuckin’ nut, just talks you senseless?

So when I did promotion I’d have my “spiritual adviser” standing there, with two giant Samoan guys standing behind him. And he’d launch into the P-E-G principle: Politeness, Etiquette, and Good Grooming, which is something that he, as a manager, had taught these two men. It mimicked a scene that was very familiar in old-school wresting promotion—there’s some screaming nut-job manager type with a big stupid guy nodding his head in the background. We used to think, “This is brilliant and very on spot.” It was improv, too, baby!

And then things started to pick up with the album. I remember I got on David Letterman’s show right away. At the time, he was new, and he was on at 12:30
A.M
. And I was new, too, and I was funny—that’s all the people booking the show knew. At that point, Dave would play a little clip from your video and then he’d let you talk. So when I came on, I decided to pick my foot up and put it on the chair in a certain way that was irreverent and comfortable.

I really wasn’t nervous. I was ready. Dave was so funny when he started talking to me, so I had fun with him. He asked about my mom, and I told him that we used to have some pet fish, and one of them got fungus and had a tumor, so my mother decided to operate on it. She got out a cuticle scissor and sterilized it and everything. Then she laid the fish out, kept it wet, and cut away the tumor, then painted mercurochrome on it and put it back in the tank.

And the fish lived. Dave said, “So your mom is a fish doctor.” Yes, I said. Unfortunately what happened was our fish were Siamese fighter
fish, so when my mother put the female fish back in the tank with the others, a male fish killed her. My mother was so upset, she took the male fish out with the net and put him down and said, “Bad fish, bad fish!” and smacked him a little with the net. Unfortunately, that chopped his tail off. Then she tried to put him back in the water because she didn’t want him to die. It was all a terrible thing, but you can’t take a fish out of the tank and spank him. The story got so crazy and then Paul Shaffer started chiming in . . . it was pretty funny.

So Letterman was the first adventure, and then the record company realized that they had something. Until I came along, they never understood how to put together fashion (well, my version of it) and humor with music. Music had become a visual medium, so Dave Wolff and I created this whole world that we brought with us when we did appearances or press, which is much more intriguing and interesting, if you ask me. My mother became a regular character in my entourage, and she made up a stage name for herself: Catrine Dominique. Like I said, she liked everything French.

And then there was always Captain Lou, who would go ranting about something, and then I’d chime in, and it would get silly. Captain Lou became famous all over the world because he was in videos like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “She Bop,” and “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.” We were walking a little bit of a fine line between earning respect and not being taken seriously, but it was still really fun. I’d think, “Who cares if they think I’m a good singer or not? I
am
a good singer.” When I sang “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and came back with “Time After Time,” that’s when I proved that you can rock out, be a good singer and writer, but also use humor.

Then Dave Wolff made a deal with Vince McMahon that if he continued to play my videos on his shows, I would go on Johnny Carson and promote wrestling. So that’s what we did. And you know
what? It worked. Johnny Carson was huge for me. Although he always called me Sydney and never Cyndi. But hey, it was Johnny Carson, and that was his pet name for me, which was kind of cool. When I first went on his show, I wore the sparkly, full skirt I wore in the “Time After Time” video and this wonderful rust-and-yellow Hawaiian-print shirt that I loved (I still have it), and I tied tulle around my head in a bow. I saw that tulle on a mannequin named Esther at Screaming Mimi’s first. My friend Biff Chandler, who was Laura’s partner at Screaming Mimi’s, came up with that idea. (Sadly, he died of AIDS in the nineties. At that time, we were losing a lot of visionaries to AIDS.) All the mannequins had names. And I thought, “Wow, that tulle is good.” (My hair never seemed big enough for me; I always felt like I was this small person.) And I brought Johnny a pair of sunglasses. He said to me, “You dress so unusual.” I said, “Really? Because it doesn’t seem that way to me. I think
you
dress very unusual.”

The wrestling connection kept growing to the point where the executives from the label were in on it. I was warned that I might have a fight with Lou on “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s segment because he was saying a lot of stuff that I might not like, but I said that even though we were going to fight, I still wanted to promote women’s lib somehow. Dave Wolff said, “Just have him say women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and then we’ll do a whole fight thing with female wrestlers.” So the Fabulous Moolah was brought in. (I’ve always been unhappy that I never really got to know Moolah, who died a few years ago, like I would have liked to, because she was awesome.)

So when Captain Lou said that thing about being barefoot and pregnant, I had a freakout on the show. I turned over a table and I pulled Lou’s beard and hit him over the head with a bag. But they showed a clip of it on
Entertainment Tonight
as if it were real! I was
watching it with Dave Wolfe, and we were laughing, and saying, “How could you not see the humor? It’s so ridiculous.” It was funny. But my friend Rose called me up and said, “Cyn, when you freaked out like that, people saw you angry.” She was worried.

Working with Vince McMahon was very different for us. It became challenging at times because it was taking a lot of time away from making music. But we did a lot of really fun stuff that left its mark on wrestling and on Dave Wolff and me. When we were in it, Dave was like a little kid. And if you talk to anybody working in professional wrestling you’ll see that same little kid look in their eyes. It was something that I was able to share that with Dave Wolff.

While all this was going on, we were getting ready to do the video for “Time After Time,” the second single. Edd was directing again, and he got a scriptwriter to come in and write it. I changed some things I didn’t like, which everybody does, and I said, “I want my mother in it, and I want the vision of her mother to haunt her.” Dave was also going to be in the video (he wanted to be in the video—Dave liked being in the limelight), and I wanted to do something that was really going to surprise him. So I had my hair cut and shaved in a checkerboard pattern, and I didn’t let him see it. So when I pull off my hat in that scene in the diner, that was really him freaking out.