Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (20 page)

I went up to Bette Midler and told her that I loved her. Then they fuckin’ relegated Bette Midler, whose voice I’ve always loved—
Bette
Midler
—to some corner to stand with the nonsinging Jacksons in the chorus! Then again, Billy Joel was there, and they didn’t ask him to sing solo, either. But I kept looking around and thinking, “Where are the women with the big voices? Where’s Aretha? Where’s Patti LaBelle?”

I got a good part in the song that Dave really vied to get for me. I knew the line but I didn’t know how I was going to sing it until I started singing. It was the pivotal point of the bridge and I had just been watching one amazing singer after another—fuckin’ Steve Perry’s voice is amazing, Daryl Hall’s voice is amazing. It got around to me and the line just came barrel-assing out. The best things I sing are sung when I’m not in control, when I just allow everything to come through me. But I think I scared the hell out of Kim Carnes, who was next to me. Then Quincy kept going, “What is that jangling sound?” He stopped everything, came over to me, and said, “It’s all of your jewelry.” I thought, “He said to check your ego at the door—not your jewelry.” But I didn’t say that—I just gave him the jewelry and moved on. For me, it’s not really just what you wear that’s important, it’s how you accessorize what you wear. Hey, we were being filmed—I wanted to look good. Without that jewelry, I felt like a plain Jane. Except for the bright yellow and orange paint in my hair, that is.

The session went on for around ten hours. I thought it was interesting that the first verse and bridge
included
women and the big finish
excluded
women. It was a long night. We walked out at dawn. I felt like I was tripping.

Then the Grammys were the following month. I was nominated for seven of them. Janet Perr won for Best Art Direction on the album, and I won Best New Artist, which is the kiss of death. (Look at the artists who have gotten it in the past: Rickie Lee Jones. Christopher Cross. Arrested Development.) I felt so embarrassed because the year
before, Michael Jackson won everything—there were pictures of him carrying an armload of Grammys—and I think the record company people expected me to do what he did and clean up. But I was up against all these big heavy hitters: Springsteen, Prince, Tina Turner, and Lionel Richie. I was the little guy.

“Time After Time” was nominated for Best Song and Phil’s “Against All Odds” won. But here’s the thing: I haven’t heard a lot of covers of “Against All Odds” but I never stop hearing covers of “Time After Time.” So maybe it’s not the award that counts. It’s wonderful to hear what other people embrace about a song that was so personal to me. Tuck & Patti did an especially great version of “Time After Time.” So did Patti LaBelle. It’s been covered by dozens of artists—I can’t even keep track of how many. But the most honored I ever felt was when Miles Davis covered it. I never wanted him to meet me either, because I thought if he didn’t like me (like most of the old-timers), he wouldn’t play my song anymore, and the way he played it was pure magic.

Between dates on my tour, I’d come back for other awards shows like the very first MTV Video Music Awards, where I won for Best Female Video (and during the 1987 MTV Awards I got to perform “Change of Heart” as I was lowered down on an acrobat bar, which was pretty great). I worked very hard with MTV. I loved video and music. I love the visual age I live in.

So that first year after releasing
She’s So Unusual
was nonstop, and a lot of it was a thrill. It was the kind of crazy year where my mother did a television show on celebrity moms and became friends with Cher’s mother and Stevie Wonder’s (who said she was tough).

But I had a rough time, too, because I started to get sick from endometriosis. Worse, my friend Gregory started to get sick. I loved Gregory and always felt protective of him, because of everything he
went through. He was thrown out of his house at twelve when his mother walked in on his stepfather raping him. She kept the stepfather and threw out the kid—a sad story I will never forget. Gregory had not had an easy time. Once, he and I were talking about what he would do with his life and he said, “Oh, what does it matter? We’re crazy, anyway.” And from that, I understood what it felt like to have a terrible self-image—to feel like trash thrown out into the street, hoping that the wind would just blow you away so that you wouldn’t have to hang around anymore. It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t abused as a kid how that abuse can screw up your head—how you feel it doesn’t matter what you do because the worst was already done to you. And I know in my heart that Gregory must have felt that way.

I also watched Gregory’s cousin Diana, a transgender woman, be ridiculed for even trying to be the woman that she felt she was inside. You have to remember what a frightening time it was in New York City in the eighties. There were marauders, young brutal men, coming from New Jersey and Brooklyn, driving around the West Village looking to beat whoever they thought was gay.

When Gregory got sick, we had just shot “She Bop” together. Once again, all of my friends, including Carl and Gregory, were in the video. They played the robotic customers at the fast food place. Soon after that, the two of them sat me down to tell me that Gregory was ill. They made it sound as if everything was going to be okay, but really, AIDS was a death sentence then. I was devastated. During my time in the apartment on Seventy-seventh Street, I had come to think that my little Seventy-seventh Street family and I would grow old together, and at one point we would be sitting at a pink hotel somewhere in Florida sipping mint juleps (whatever they are) on a veranda and reminiscing about old times together.

Carl was strong at first but it’s hard to watch the guy you love go down like that. Gregory had had unprotected sex when he worked at a bar when he was younger, and that’s how it happened. But people just didn’t know that there was a risk of AIDS then.

When folks ask me why I work for the community, I say it’s because of my friends and my family. My work with the True Colors Fund—and my work with Colleen Jackson on the True Colors Residence, a shelter in Harlem that she had built for LGBT youth who have been kicked out by their parents—is, of course, directly related to all of them. How could it not be? (More on that later.)

I saw AIDS change and then debilitate friends, like my hair and makeup artist Patrick Lucas. He’s still alive but he fights all the time because the disease doesn’t make it easy and you have to take so many drugs. He once told me that the drugs are so hard that AIDS survivors say among themselves that this one or that one is dying of “old AIDS.” Patrick was a huge part of the creation of my makeup and hair in the beginning. We would come up with these ideas and he would execute them to perfection. I’d say I wanted the checkered pattern on his shirt on my eyes and he would paint checkerboards on my lids. He also colored my hair for “Money Changes Everything” when we were on the road and I couldn’t go to Vidal Sassoon. He made my roots blond and my ends red like a flame. He also did my makeup for the
Rolling Stone
cover. The two of us were in perfect sync. One of my eyes is shorter than the other, though, so I would drive him crazy about making them look the same.

AIDS also took my good friend Louis Falco, who created the choreography in the movie
Fame.
I hope that one of these years we’ll wipe out the disease for good. But until then, I quote Nancy Cohen, former executive director of the MAC AIDS Fund and former head of the Viva Glam campaign to fight AIDS, who said, “AIDS is 100 percent
preventable, and 100 percent noncurable.” You can live with AIDS, but it ain’t easy. And if AIDS don’t kill ya, the meds can. So I’m committed to fighting it and committed to helping the LGBT kids who are on the street.

While Gregory was in the hospital, dying at the impossibly young age of twenty-seven, he asked that I write a song for him. He wanted me to release it in the spirit of “That’s What Friends Are For.” I thought, “What, like Burt Bacharach? Yikes, that is a tall order.” Most of my life I’ve been able to deal with the notion that there will always be people who are better and greater than I am, but I can’t concentrate on other people. So I wrote “Boy Blue.” I poured out my heart, and my liver, into that song, but unfortunately it wasn’t right for repetitive play on the radio. It was tangled up in so much of my sorrow and so cloaked in my sadness that I don’t know if it was good enough for him.

And the True Colors Residence has a plaque on the building with a dedication on it to the memory of “Gregory Natal, Boy Blue.” We couldn’t save him, but maybe we’ll save a few others. I’ve said it before: God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.

I
N 1985, LIFE
got weirder. Dave Wolff had heard that Steven Spielberg was doing a project with Huey Lewis, and he thought, “Well, why not do something with Cyndi?” Steven had written a new movie,
The Goonies,
which was a kind of a
Raiders of the Lost Ark
–style adventure film for kids. Richard Donner was going to be the director. And one day Dave came to me, all excited, and said, “Oh my God, we got a meeting with Steven Spielberg in LA. He wants you to do the soundtrack.”

I was a little frightened. I’d never met him. I knew he was really creative and brilliant and I was such a huge fan but he was also, from what I’d heard, kind of a strange dude. And I was concerned about keeping the integrity of what I was doing. I wanted to stay true to the fan base that I had built.

It meant so much to me to meet Steven, but then when I got to his office in Hollywood, it seemed like such a sexist place. There were no women except this one producer named Terri, who was awesome. You can’t believe how they were all talking about women; like they’d start talking about casting an actress and make gross comments about her body. It made me wonder, “What am I doing here?”

But we stood around and made small talk. At one point Steven said, “Streisand sang to me once.” I thought to myself, “Yeah, but I’m here now. Maybe we could talk about that?” Then he ordered lobster for everyone for lunch, which seemed strange because it just delayed the meeting even more.

But then we finally started talking about the movie and how he was going to direct my music video for the soundtrack, which was so exciting. His idea was for me to perform in front of an old film projected onto a green screen behind me. I was crushed. What I should have said was something like, “You know, I came all this way to work with you, and I was just hoping to work with you on a real set—working on a green screen is kind of disheartening for me, even though it’s you.”

But did I say that? No. I just didn’t know how to be diplomatic. So I blurted out, “That’s not very creative.” Everyone around me choked on their lobster. And of course, I just had to keep going, so I added, “Maybe we could do something a little more inspiring.” And he got up and said, “I think I was told I wasn’t creative.” Then he said he wasn’t going to work on the video anymore—I would work with Dick Donner. Fine, I said. And he walked out.

I never got to tell him what I really meant to say, but that’s me: I always say the wrong things to the right people. I had no filter, and I was just thrown into these situations. I didn’t know how to mix with the big guys. I only know how to do what I do. I don’t have many famous friends. I work every day of my life—that’s all I do. I live for my work.

And although at the time what I should have been working on was my next record, I threw myself into the
Goonies
soundtrack. I was working twelve-hour days in Los Angeles, living in motels and getting sad, because it was lonesome and LA was very cliquish. But I got all these artists like the Bangles and Teena Marie on the soundtrack,
and it was going well until Spielberg went in and stripped most of the music from the film. Apparently he felt like there was too much music, so the soundtrack was meaningless because most of the songs weren’t in the movie. The only thing that ended up in it was my voice here and there.

But we had a blast shooting a two-part video for the
Goonies
single, which no one had ever done before. I got all these wrestlers to be in it, like the Iron Sheik, Roddy Piper, “Classy” Freddie Blassie, and Andre the Giant (who saves the day at the end of part 2). The Bangles played pirates, and the night before the shoot, I dyed their hair crazy colors in the bathroom of the Sunset Marquis Hotel. There was an ant trail in the room, in a perfect line like a marching band—these were Catholic-school ants. The videos were a lot of work but I really cared about them. That was maybe the problem—I focused on each little thing I did too much, and it slowed things down and drove me crazy, but I couldn’t help myself.

After the videos were done they wanted me to change the song title from “Good Enough” to “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.” And I didn’t want to, because I thought if I put the word “Goonies” in, it would sound cheesy and no one would want to play it—and that’s exactly what happened. Even though they squashed it on commercial radio, it became an underground hit, at least—because there are so many kids who are just Goonies. But I was so bothered that they ruined the name of that song that I refused to sing it for years. I finally started again a few years ago.

In the summer of 1985 I went to Nashville for a radio convention and that’s when I found out I had endometriosis. I had a tumor in my stomach the size of a grapefruit, along with all these other little ones. I went into the hospital, and the doctors were saying scary things like “We need to operate now.” But when they gave me the consent form
they always give you to sign before you get operated on, outlining the potential risks and stuff, I went through it, saying, “I’m not doing this, I’m not doing this, and I’m not doing this.” I said to this poor doctor, “I want you to write down exactly what you’re going to do and initial it. You can take out all the endometriosis, but you can’t take out anything else—not one tube, not one ovary, nothing.” She said, “That’s pretty severe—what if I have to save your life?”