Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (27 page)

We walked back to the hotel, and David kissed me good night in the elevator. I went back to my room and thought about it, because we were friends and had a lot of laughs together. Then I called him up on the phone and said, “Excuse me, did you just kiss me?” He said, “Well, you know, I usually never do this.” He sounded a little nervous and like he was putting his clothes back on or moving around the room or something. So I said, “Why don’t you come upstairs and finish what you started?” I think that was a line from an old Mae West movie. Hey, it worked for her.

So he came upstairs. And we made love for the first time on a bed drenched in moonlight, against the sound of the ocean waves. It was Valentine’s Day 1990. That’s why if I’m ever working and not home on Valentine’s Day, it’s such a heartbreak for me.

The thing was, he still had a girlfriend. But like I said, at that point, they weren’t doing so good—if they were, I don’t think anything would have happened. So I said to him, “Listen, I’m crackers for ya, and I don’t do so good as the other woman. So you gotta make up your mind here. Talk to her.” So he did. David’s not really the cheating type anyway. But because of my experience with French Fry, I decided to be very clear about my boundaries.

In the meantime, I was so happy because they brought a beauty makeup artist onto the set. The guy before had a specialty in blood and special effects and he made my eyes look a little uneven. You know, the “One eye looking at ya and the other for ya” look. The new makeup artist was an older woman named Marie, and I loved her. She was funny and supportive and knew when I was trying to remember lines. And she loved David, too. I talked to her one time about him and said, “I don’t know about this, I just met him.” Because after two weeks he started saying, “If we’re going to do this, then I want to either move in together and be serious, or not. I just have to know.” I was like,
whoa.
The night after he told me that, I had a dream that we were Neanderthals, and we were walking across the continent toward the sun. (When Africa and South America were one continent.) We had to get to the sun, because something was happening to the ground. In the dream, we had spent our whole life walking to the sun, and I realized that the man I spent my life with in that dream was David. The first thing I did when I woke up was check my face, because I was so upset about my Neanderthal facial hair. I mean, how much electrolysis would that take, anyway?

David and I did move in together. We needed to see if it was just one of those movie romances. And at first it was a concern of mine that the last serious relationship I was in, the guy’s name was David. When I first became friends with David Thornton, he was the murderer in the film. So I called him “the murderer.” But when things changed and we were not in the movie, I started worrying that I was collecting Davids. So I went to see a therapist, the one I saw while I was making
She’s So Unusual.

In the end, the therapist said something like, “Okay, let me get this straight. You met a guy you love, but his name is David. And you’re willing to break it off with him because his name is David?” Yes, I said. And the therapist said, “Then you’ve got a problem.” And I realized, “Yeah. Right.” I mean, what the heck? As Shakespeare once said, “What’s with the name?” (I mean “in a name,” of course.)

We got married in 1991. We didn’t wait very long since we had both just had long engagements. We figured, what the hell, if it don’t work out, it don’t work out. So we gave it a shot. David bought me a few different rings. One was an 1840s crystal that had belonged to a Hindu princess. I believe in reincarnation and the past, so he thought that would be a good contender. There was an antique Roman ring with the stamp of Eros, too, and a Victorian English regards ring with gems whose first letters spelled “regards” across the finger. That was the one I picked.

The ceremony was in New York, but we had a hard time finding a place to get married. I was going to lie about my religious beliefs and everything else just to get married in a church. But David said, “Why even bother?” Instead, he wanted to get married in our favorite Italian restaurant, Siracusa. I thought it would be great for the reception, but they had a little grocery in the front where they sold spaghetti and sauce and stuff, and I kept thinking, “I’m going to walk down the aisle
next to the homemade spaghetti?” I waited my whole life to get married. Were we going to play “Volare,” too?

So David kept looking, looking, looking, and he came up with this place called the Friends Meetinghouse. It was Quaker, and it was perfect, and the thought behind it was beautiful too. We would invite our friends and family and join as friends and lovers. But when we met with the muckety-mucks of the church, we did have to lie. David did most of it, while I stayed out of sight. And when I went in, I was very plain, in a running suit and brown hair. (I look very Italian with brown hair, like you can hear the organ grinder.)

And then David and I talked about who would marry us. I said that if I believed in anything, I believed in the Church of Voice. I’m a singer, I told him, so let’s get married by a singer/minister. So we asked Al Green, but that did not work out. Then we thought of Little Richard. (Those were the only two guys I knew of who were reverends.) He was from my community too—the rock and roll community—and I happen to think that Little Richard’s voice is one of the greatest in rock and roll. So my tour manager Robin contacted him and Little Richard said he would do it. It was exciting.

I wanted to wear white hot pants and go-go boots but David didn’t want to feel like he was at a rock show. So I went straight. I went to Saks with my friend and then-stylist, Laura. We got an A-line satin dress that went to the knee—very sixties—with embroidery down the front. My hair would be a soft blonde, and I had long white gloves, a pillbox hat with an A-line veil down to the chin, and satin shoes with an A-line bow. My aunt Gracie told me I looked like Grace Kelly. I figured that was as conventional as I could go. But I lied to the woman at Saks and told her I needed to dress like a bride for a rock video so I could get married in private. My grandmother was the maid of honor, and I didn’t want her to have a heart attack.

To help with the wedding, we hired Robin, and my friend Annie recommended a florist named Dorothea. She did the most beautiful arrangements I had ever seen in my life. The flowers were all white and pale pink. My grandmother was very down because she had fallen and was in a wheelchair. So I figured, you know, nothing cheers a dame up like a pretty dress and a nice occasion to go out to, so I asked her to be my maid of honor. I loved my nana.

My sister came too. And Katie Valk and Howard and lots of friends, but no business people at all, since it was the business that wrecked the last David relationship. And Rob Hyman from the Hooters was there with his wife, Sally. We had become very close to them. I met up with them again when I performed with Roger Waters at the Berlin Wall in 1990. The funny thing was it was like no time had passed. And now Sally was part of the picture and it was so much fun. She was hilarious, awesome, and she and David got along like a house on fire.

It was nice to start making more friends. Since I was always away, I never had a lot of them. I had my band but that was because I’d spend most of my time traveling with them. In the meantime I never got to see friends like Bonnie Ross, the one I mentioned who worked for the Red Cross and was dressed as a nurse in the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video. I met her at a gig and just adored her—still do. I always remembered her telephone number because it spelled out “MADLOVE.” I love seeing her in that video. Like I said, I tried to make a photo album of all my friends and my family, and extended friends and family, in my videos. Then I could always go back and see them—“Oh, look, that’s my aunt Gracie, what a pisser! Look at my cousin, look at my brother!”

I had a wonderful time at my wedding, and I was so in love with David. I wondered what David’s parents must have made of having
me as a daughter-in-law. David’s father taught English at Harvard and wrote books about Robert Burns, the famous Scottish poet. I saw him twitching during the ceremony because Little Richard was murdering vowels all over the place. The night before I had put my arms around him and lifted him a bit and said, “Don’t worry. You’re not losing a son—you’re gaining somebody who don’t talk English that good.”

We were on Long Island for our honeymoon for only a day because David was an understudy in a play and they called him back to be on standby. Years later we finally had a real honeymoon in Hawaii. After the wedding, I took a minute to have a life, because I felt like I didn’t have one. And if you’re an isolated artist, what the fuck do you write about? How it’s really tough to live in an ivory tower? Or how my bodyguard looked at me the wrong way and so now I’m feeling depressed? I wanted a real life. So I bought Dave Wolff’s half of the house we bought in Connecticut. My new husband had already moved into my loft in New York City and we spent weekends in Connecticut, or sometimes we’d go to the house on the Cape.

Just as an aside here, my house in Connecticut is not too far from where that chimp named Travis ripped off that woman’s face. You remember that horrible story, right? When the chimp became an adolescent she had to start giving it Xanax. Then it freaked out one day and the woman called her friend to help her and it ended up biting the friend’s face. I would have gone to the vet and gotten a tranquilizer gun or to the zoo to ask for help.

So anyway, my mother, who now lives on Long Island, called me, all upset, and said, “Oh, I was so worried, because that chimp was near your town.”

“Ma,” I said, “had it been me, I swear to God, the headlines would have read ‘Chimp just didn’t want to have fun.’ Okay? That’s how you would have known it was me.”

Anyway, after David and I got married, we stepped back for a bit and went up to the Cape for a month. I just wanted to be alive. I had to get back to why I had started to sing in the first place. Why did I become an artist? What was my story? I was going to write a book but I guess the timing wasn’t right then, so I told myself, “Okay, you can’t write a book, but you can write your story in songs. So do it.”

I started writing after I had been at the Cape for a while. Annie and my other friends and family came to visit me there. And around the time when I began working on the album that would become
Hat Full of Stars,
I traveled with Annie Flanders to go to Alee Willis’s birthday party in LA. (Now that I have a kid, I can’t even imagine just getting on a plane to see a friend.) Allee Willis is a musician who became a close friend. She would eventually cowrite five songs on the album (Rob and Eric cowrote some, too). I stayed at Allee’s house, and it was so wonderfully nutty, it looked a little like my “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and Jacques Tati’s
Mon Oncle.
Outside her house, her walk curved and had green on one side and blue on the other—it was like an art piece.

I wrote the title track, “Hat Full of Stars,” with Nicky Holland, who lived upstairs from me in the Thread Building. The idea for the song came from this hat that I got a long time ago in Vermont, before I went to college. Like I talked about, I was by myself, and very lonely, and oh my God, was it cold. I used to visit the Free Store in Johnson, Vermont, which was for poor people, like a Goodwill. It was a wonderful store with great clothes, and that’s where I got the hat, which was kind of a cap.

I wore it all the time. Even though it was cold, Vermont was so beautiful, and I always wished I had someone to share it with. So one night, I took my hat off and put all the stars in it. That way, every time I put my hat back on I could remember that beautiful night sky, and
maybe I could share it with someone. When I met Dave Wolff he wore that hat a lot. But what I was also saying in those lyrics, metaphorically, was to create a magical feeling around yourself. That’s what it was always about for me, to make myself feel brighter, more alive, taller, with bigger hair, to wear flashes of color that invigorated me, or to paint my hair with them, or my face.

Even though “Hat Full of Stars” is a sad song, it’s also uplifting. There’s a line in there that goes “You could’ve seen far / You should’ve seen the magic / In my hat full of stars.” It’s “coulda, shoulda,” because like I said, in the neighborhood I came from, everyone always said, “I coulda been this, I shoulda done that,” but they never did. Well, I made sure I did—that I wasn’t one of the “shoulda, coulda, woulda” people.

I also wanted to write about social issues, about real people. There’s a song on the album called “Product of Misery” (remember, that was Bob Barrell’s phrase) about a woman who is broken down, whose life is drudgery. That was a response to the George H. W. Bush administration, who sold us a bill of goods. And I put “A Part Hate” on the record, which I wasn’t able to do for the last one. The timing was right because the Rodney King riots were spreading across our country. In a lot of ways I saw apartheid in my own country.

“Sally’s Pigeons,” which I wrote with Mary Chapin Carpenter, was about a girl from the neighborhood who died from a back-alley abortion. With that kind of story I needed to hypnotize people with the music. I made all different little sounds part of the story: the synthesizer, the loop, the rhythm of the street, of the people, and for the first time in my life (except for “Time After Time”) I was singing my songs, singing my stories. It’s so important to me to write songs that are taken from my life so that they have real meaning.

I always felt that the paths that people took were worn into how they walked, how they lived, and I know it’s romanticizing things, but
the important thing for me is to portray the richness of their stories in sounds and words. Even the album cover, for me, always has to be a painting of the stories put together.

When I was looking for a coproducer, I talked with Run-DMC’s producer, and I told him how I wanted to take loops from hip-hop and mix them with pop but that I didn’t know how to be successful at it and appease the record company, too. He said, “But you’re Cyndi Lauper—you could do whatever you want.” I thought, “I wish.” I didn’t go with him because I wasn’t sure if he would be able to keep the record-company guys happy. Instead I went with Junior Vasquez, who ended up pissing them off anyway. But I loved Junior and had a good time with him.