Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (22 page)

To capture the spirit of the song, I made everything dark on the stage. And because it was a healing song, I held a little amethyst that was shaped like a heart in my hand, which I didn’t show anybody. I was
so frightened on that stage and holding on to that amethyst soothed me. And I went to a place that was otherworldly, that allowed me to express my message: You want to heal.
Go heal.
And so, I learned the power of a whisper.

People picked up on that message pretty quickly and the song went to number one. Starting with the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” tour, some runaways started showing up on the road. They’d follow us in their cars and sometimes we’d take them in and feed them or talk to them. There was one I remember well: a fifteen-year-old girl named Donna who wanted to join our tour. Her parents were very strict, very Christian, especially her father, who was really radical. When you’re like that, all you’re going to do is chase your kids away. So our production manager, Robin Irvine, who was very kindhearted, brought her to my dressing room and told me, “You gotta talk to this kid.” So I talked to her and she told me how her parents were so fucking strict and had forced all this Bible shit on her. I think the Bible is the raciest book you can freakin’ buy. It’s got murder, incest, rape, stoning, pillage, war—every kind of treacherous, horrible thing—with a very sexist tilt. Which is why I can’t stomach reading it. (I’m like, “Are you kidding me? That’s what you say about women?”)

I was raised a Catholic, like I’ve said, and my mother was thrown out of the church because she was divorced. It kind of puts a damper on your opinion of the religion when they tell you your mother is going to go to hell, and they don’t even know her. So when I was younger, I believed in that stuff with a grain of salt. I knew that there were people who used religion to control other people, and I decided a long time ago that that wasn’t happening for me. I was eight around that time. (Yes, that young.) I follow my own basic code of conduct that can be found in every religion, but mostly it’s a commonsense thing—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I told Donna that
she needed to communicate with her parents more and that when she was eighteen, she could live her own life. So I spent hours talking to Donna and let her stay the night, but then I sent her home. She was a kid. I met her again in the nineties and she was doing well.

But even though I had become an inspiration to others, I was still me. I still said the wrong things to the right people. For instance, the next spring, in 1987, Dave and I were invited to a seder in Los Angeles that was hosted by a couple of record-company guys, including CBS Records executive Walter Yetnikoff. There were a bunch of famous people there, and power brokers with their trophy wives who barely spoke (and when they did it was about their husbands). It was hellish because I had to sit with people whose values were so dynamically different from mine. They were so Republican that I wanted to kill myself. I definitely felt the hierarchy of who was who. The husbands were all kowtowing to Walter so they wouldn’t get stepped on by him in front of everyone. That year the seder fell on Easter Sunday and I was sitting there thinking, “This is how we’re spending Easter?”

Conversation included subjects like Warren Beatty only giving parts to women who gave him a blow job. I thought, “Has every woman gone completely nuts?” Then Julio Iglesias leaned in close and said to me, “You are so clever, but you do not like me.” I was like, “Hon, I don’t not like you, you seem like a nice fellow, but why are you hitting on me when you can see I’ve got a guy here?”

I also saw Bruce Springsteen and his new wife Julianne Phillips, the actress/model who had no career after him. Big mistake to marry him. Big fuckin’ mistake! She was going somewhere, and after that relationship, not so much. I always say, “See a famous man, run the other way.” The only person who was never hurt by being with a famous man was Madonna.

I was so relieved to see Bruce. I went over to him and said, “Oh my God, I can’t even believe I’m here, I don’t know these people. The women just talk when they’re spoken to and when they do talk, it’s just about their husbands.” Julianne nodded and said, “Yeah, I know.” But Springsteen just gave me a dirty look. He might as well have taken a fuckin’ knife and cut my heart out because at that moment, I thought, “
Et tu,
Bruce-ay?” And then I felt so duped that I became the annoying American to him because I thought that was the worst thing I could do to get even. Like the person you want to get rid of but you can’t lose and they talk too close and say obnoxious things and they don’t stop. I’m the kind of person who if I know you don’t like me and I think you’re being a shit about it, I’m going to get even closer just to fuckin’ upset you. And if you get upset I turn it up even more.

Bruce obviously wanted nothing to do with me, so that’s exactly what I did. Bruce was sitting at a table, so I stood at the edge and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Bruce, why don’t you do a duet with Placido Domingo? You and Placido could do ‘Born to Run’ together.” At the time, they were pairing up strange people to do duets so they could sell a bunch of records. I just wanted to annoy him, and it worked. He hated me, and I gave it to him tooth and fuckin’ nail because I felt in my heart, “How could you pretend to be okay with these people?” In the seventies, while I was a housekeeper or a mother’s helper making beds, I sang along with him on the radio. I heard the way he wrote and sang about women and knew that he understood them—understood us. Instead it was like he condoned that whole horrible, sexist scene. Patti Scialfa, his current wife, is very intelligent. Not a bimbo. Not that Julianne Phillips was a bimbo—I just thought there wasn’t enough light for the both of them.

I haven’t run into Bruce since then. I don’t want to meet anybody anymore. I don’t want to know what people are like beyond their art.
When you meet somebody and they’re wonderful, it’s such a genuine surprise and it’s so nice. But I don’t want to be disappointed. It’s too much. And that extends to me, too. That’s why I tell people, “Listen, don’t confuse my work with who I am, because you’ll be disappointed.” I’ve tried my best to do good work and good things, but I’m not necessarily always fantastic as a person, and like I’ve been saying, I do and say a lot of things that are wrong. I’m human. But that’s not what a fan thinks. I know, because I’ve been that fan.

I
STARTED GETTING SCRIPTS
from movie companies, because at the time they were really gunning for pop singers like Madonna to star in films. They wanted me to be in
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
—remember that one, with Sarah Jessica Parker? It was about girls who enter a dance competition. When I read the script I thought, “How dare you take what I’ve done, dress characters up like me, and then write this stupid, inane script about nothing, when everything I’ve struggled to do was about something?” I couldn’t believe it.

Then I got a call to do a movie called
Vibes,
which was a Ron Howard film. I was—and am—such a huge fan of his. I thought it was awesome the way he used actors like Don Ameche and Hume Cronyn in
Cocoon.
But I said, “Listen, I would love to do the movie, but I may actually suck. So why don’t you do a screen test and see if I’m good enough? The last thing I want to do is be in a movie and stink.” They said okay, and Ron Howard came to see me in my New York City apartment. He was so nice and down-to-earth. When I was doing the screen test, I kept thinking, “Oh my God, I’m being directed by Ron Howard.”

I mean, I had no acting experience aside from my videos. I just listened to everything he said, did what he told me, and he liked it. He
made me watch it, too, and I didn’t think I looked terrible on-screen. So I signed up to do the movie. I played a psychic named Sylvia, who, with another psychic (to be played by Dan Aykroyd), gets hired by a rich guy to find his son in South America. But as it turns out, we’re really hired to find a hidden Incan treasure where all the world’s psychic energy comes from. To me, right off the bat, that was so much fun.

I tried to figure out what the hell this girl Sylvia would look like. She was a beautician as well as a psychic, and she was supposed to have pink hair—like, you know those girls who mean to bleach their hair blond but turn it pink? I fell asleep after I bleached it though, and my hair turned white and kind of burned off in spots, so I couldn’t process it again to turn it a different color. So I just let it be white-blond. And then I saw that Madonna was doing a movie called
Who’s That Girl
and she was a bleached blonde too. I was like, “Okay—nice. We can never get away from each other.”

On the topic of hair dye, I knew about it: I’ve been dyeing my hair since I was probably nine, when I used food coloring to make it green for Saint Patrick’s Day. Then at twelve, I used Sun-In, then Nice ’n Easy, before I moved on to the hard stuff. I once tried to dye it back to brown—my natural color—but it turned red by mistake. I liked it though, so I kept it.

I wanted to be good in the movie, so I took classes at a beauty school to learn how to do finger waves and brush up on my other beautician skills. I also started to study with psychics to find out how they did their thing. They all told me, “You are going to be a spiritual leader,” and I thought, “I sincerely doubt that. I won’t be doing any yogi whatever any time soon.”

I met this one psychic, Ginny Duffy, who my vocal teacher and friend introduced me to when I told her I was studying psychics. Ginny was different from the others because she did past-life regression,
where you use hypnosis to recover what they believe are memories of past lives. Ginny connected people to their angels, too. I used some of her mannerisms when I was communicating on-screen with the spirits.

I was always having interesting dreams that seemed to dip into my own past lives, so the whole idea of it didn’t seem that outlandish to me. Like once when I was sleeping next to Dave Wolff I dreamed that I was a contessa in the New World, in a very hot place, and I rode in a carriage up to a fortress. When I got out to walk, I was smaller than normal. Then someone grabbed me, a kind of dark Zorro figure—it was Dave. Another time I dreamed that I was Dutch, from another time, and I had gotten a small army to chase this rascal thief but I really liked him—that’s why I was chasing him. Again, when I woke up, I realized it was Dave. So then I thought, “Okay—past-life regression, that’s interesting.” That’s how my head was explaining everything. I was always drawn to the fact that Dave was a rascal who could talk you into anything.

Ginny also connected me to spirit guides—entities who teach, heal, and help you on your journey into spiritual awareness—and that influenced me a lot. In fact for the next decade, I was very connected to another level of consciousness and became a more spiritual person. I remember when I was promoting
True Colors,
I met a kid through the Make-A-Wish Foundation who had spina bifida. He was around twelve or thirteen and in a fucking wheelchair; he couldn’t even move. And I kept saying, “Why, God? Why come to me? I can’t fix him. I can’t do anything for this kid.” It really bugged me, and then I figured out a way to help all these kids that wouldn’t be overbearing. Ginny did this thing called Reiki, a Japanese technique using touch to reduce stress and promote healing. So I studied it, because I thought it would be a good thing to learn, because when I performed for kids
they always touched my feet and I always liked to hold their hands. I felt that if I studied Reiki, I would be able to give them healing energy, something more than just entertainment—something that would really make them feel better.

The movie company also gave me this acting coach who was amazing. Her name was Sondra Lee and she was a kind, wonderful teacher who really guided me. Sondra was an actress all through the fifties and sixties. She played Tiger Lily in
Peter Pan
and the young girl at the party in
La Dolce Vita.
In her 2009 memoir,
I’ve Slept with Everybody
, she said she lost her virginity to Marlon Brando—can ya imagine?

Anyway—as it turned out, Dan Aykroyd liked me but felt uneasy about my acting abilities. We did a reading together, where we rehearsed the script, and I was struggling, thinking, “Am I supposed to read it like I’m acting or am I supposed to read it with no feeling?” I was totally green, and nobody told me how to do it. And when Dan saw what I did, I guess he felt my approach was just wrong and he kept saying, “How are you going to talk to your spirit guide?” I couldn’t answer him at first because I was lost in the script, and I could tell he felt like I didn’t have a clue. He became uneasy about working opposite me, which I understood, but what he didn’t realize is how much I always learn on my feet. For instance, I remember once I went to perform without my band and I had to learn how to play “Money Changes Everything” on melodica. In the end I learned the part, but it’s always nerve-wracking for everyone around me to watch me try to figure it out. Like, recently I played “True Colors” on the biggest morning show in Japan, and I had to figure out how to play it on dulcimer on the way to the TV station. The Japanese TV promotion guy was there watching me and getting unbelievably nervous, going, “Oh my God, does she know the song?” But I did it. Even though it’s sometimes last-minute and drives everyone crazy, I’m usually able to figure it out.

Anyway, so it’s understandable that Dan Aykroyd felt that way. For whatever reason, Dan decided to drop out, and Jeff Goldblum was in. Then all of a sudden instead of Ron Howard directing, they took on this other guy whose big motion picture was
Follow That Bird.
So, I was being directed by Big Bird’s director. Which kind of made me feel like Big Bird. (I kept thinking to myself, “Just make sure your hair’s not too big.”) We started filming in California in February of 1987 and went through the summer and fall, including two weeks in Ecuador.

Unfortunately, Jeff Goldblum, who I just figured would be easy to work with, turned out to be a little different and did things that I felt were really upsetting. I don’t know why he had to be that way, but he was really awful. He was a strange fellow who, if he knew what you were going to do on-screen, would do something to stop you from doing it. Like we did a love scene, and suddenly he put his big fat hands all over my face. So I took his hands and pulled them down, and he got all upset. I said, “Let me tell you something—I don’t like nobody touching my face, okay? That’s one big no-no.” He also had some sort of odd acting process where before he went into a scene, he would flip through a book, quietly rant, and get twitchy, like he was having a nervous breakdown. Well, one time we had a scene with this older character actor named Bill McCutcheon, who played the museum curator. Before we got going, Jeff stood there and did his whole nervous-breakdown thing again. I asked Bill, “Do you find this very distracting?” He said that every time Jeff did that, he couldn’t remember his lines.