Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (24 page)

Plus my cat Skeezicks kept pissing on the comforter upstairs where Walter was going to sleep and then she disappeared. I found her burrowed into the wall of the house. I should have realized then that if the cat was pissing on the comforter this wasn’t a good idea, but no, I just kept going along, trying to get everything ready for them.

When everybody showed up, I tried to treat Walter like a regular person. I took him out on the boat and scooted around the bay with him so he could forget about everything for a minute and just be a person.

Tommy Mottola brought the two little kids he had with his first wife, and when we were on the beach, Lennie’s wife, who was very good with kids, turned around to the one named Michael and said, “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” He said, “I’m going to be my mother’s lawyer.” He was maybe eight years old. I was like, “Okay, I guess things are rocky at home.” By that time, Tommy had discovered Mariah Carey.

Well, the get-together turned out to be successful because Tommy got the gig at my house. Afterward, I rued the day. You can’t get involved with this shit because these people are very dog-eat-dog. Walter had an idea to separate CBS broadcasting from CBS music but he needed someone to buy the music division from Larry Tisch, the CEO of CBS (he didn’t even like music). Walter wanted to have the Sony executives run things instead and he felt that I would be the perfect person to build up relations with the Sony executives from Japan—working as I did in the Japanese piano bars. So I schmoozed and took a photo with Akio Morita, the cofounder of Sony and inventor of the Sony Walkman, for the cover of
Time
magazine in 1988 for an article they did. I was being a good soldier. Then as time went on Walter and Tommy had a rift. We sided with Walter, which was a whole big mistake, because after that my life went to shit.

Tommy never forgot and never forgave what we did for Walter, and when he took over, the word at the label was that my stuff was being put on the back burner and that it wasn’t going to be promoted like it had been. At that point, I should have walked and contacted Seymour Stein, but he already had his girl. Don Dempsey had really understood the qualities that made me famous, and after that, I had all these knuckleheads come in and tell me things like I should dress like Katrina of Katrina and the Waves. One time I had a meeting with Tommy about my musical direction, and he said, “What records do you like that are on the charts?” I picked out the cool stuff, like what U2 was doing. Then he fuckin’ said I had to work with this other guy who used to be in Canned Heat! And then the head of A & R—Don Grierson, a nice guy, but he didn’t have much of an artistic thing going on—kept trying to make me into Heart. I was like, “I’ve already been in a cover band, thank you very much, and have no intention of doing it again.” Then one of the new heads at Sony turned to me in a meeting
and said, “What is that you’re wearing?” I thought to myself, “Are you kidding me?” I should have said, “This is what your daughter is going to wear next year.”

All of them were trying to remake me after the perceived lack of success of
True Colors,
and I didn’t want to be remade, I wanted to do what I did. But because they thought they were more important than the artist, they wanted to make the sounds, and I didn’t want to be part of that machine. I wanted out of my contract, but if I sued my label like George Michael did, I would lose, and if I made a record, I’d have to put up with one knucklehead after the other, and I was incredibly frustrated and depressed. Let me tell ya, it was not a good situation.

In the meantime,
True Colors
was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, but Barbra Streisand had her big comeback with
The Broadway Album,
and she won. I was always put against the comeback people, like Tina Turner two years before. I don’t know—I think it’s my karma. I’d rather be awarded for my work than for sentimental reasons. Or maybe it’s God telling me that it’s nice to be recognized but awards don’t make the person or the singer.

And then while all this bad stuff was happening, I was talking to Dave about our plan to get married. We had talked about it for a while. I had the engagement ring on my hand. And my manager, who was also my boyfriend since 1982, said to me, “I don’t want to get married on this downswing here. I’d rather get married when we’re doing better.”

T
HE ENGAGEMENT RING
Dave gave me was a yellow canary diamond. I saved that yellow canary diamond ring for a long time, but it might as well have just been a gold watch for ten years of service. Dave wasn’t going to get married. I wanted the picket fence: I wanted a piano in the living room, everybody sitting together on holidays with dogs and cats, playing music, singing, laughing, eating, drinking. Even if it was some kind of fantasy, I wanted that.

Dave and I would talk about our future together, and he wouldn’t actually say he
didn’t
want it. He would always just say, “One day we’ll have this,” and “One day we’ll have that.” I remember that when he said that one time, I looked at him and thought, “
One day?
What about now?” And I had begun to think about having a kid. Three generations of people would come to my concerts, and the little kids would come dressed like that punky girl from the Art of Noise video that I mentioned earlier. I would see them and think, “Look at them—they’re going to grow up listening to my music. In a way, I’m raising them. So why can’t I have my own kid?”

But Dave wasn’t into the idea, because how would we live our lifestyle while I was pregnant? And also, I wasn’t famous until I was
thirty, so I was older, which could present some problems (his mother always held that over him). And God knows what else he had lurking in the back of his head. He loved us jumping in and out of limos and being “the couple.”

Well, that was what he loved in public. At home, he’d play video games all the time and shut me out. He needed to unwind because work was such a pressure cooker. He was caught between a woman who wanted things her own way and a record company that changed hands among the biggest, most sexist, most macho guys in the world who married trophy wives—women who shut the fuck up because the man is king.

During the late eighties, all of these powerful men seemed wildly out of control. So many of them were on coke, and everyone was sexist. It was really fucked-up and I had a hard time dealing with that shit. I was surrounded by it—surrounded by men. And I had gotten sick again and had yet another operation.

I did not fit in anymore at Sony, and Dave and I weren’t fitting, either. I’d cry all the time because I couldn’t believe how we had grown apart. And the record company was torturing him. They’d say, “You’re the man—
you
tell her what to do.” Like, “You’re the man of the house, why can’t you control her?” I knew it was the end when he and I were having a fight and he said, “They’re right. You shouldn’t make your own decisions.” I was a famous woman at that point. I looked at him and thought:
“Wrong answer!”
But I just said, “Okay, that’s it.” It was the saddest thing in the world for me, because I loved him. Those interfering record company guys really broke us up—they were just pigs, thick-headed with gold chains and hair coming out of their fuckin’ shirts, white shoes, and those fuckin’ golf pants—really wrong, you know what I’m saying?

The breakup with Dave took a long time. My relationship and my
work had been everything to me, and I always thought that if I only tried harder, I could overcome the trouble. The truth is, hard work couldn’t overcome it; it just went too deep. And in the meantime I had Sony breathing down my neck. I originally wanted my third album to be a project called
Kindred Spirit
that was inspired by an old recording. This recording made you feel like you were stepping into another time. I was very much taken with the otherworldliness of it (time being a rubbery thing, anyway). I wanted to create the same kind of feeling on my record, so that’s why the song “Kindred Spirit,” which did make it onto the record, had that old scratchy sound. I played a dulcimer (which I had taught myself) and my voice sounded like it was from another time, too.

I wanted the album to be called
Kindred Spirit
because all those old recordings were kindred spirits. But the label, big surprise, was more interested in commerce than in art. There’s a way to mix the two, but I never did it the right way. I just thought about the art and the magic of the music.

And then what happened was, they switched label heads again. The new guy in charge just loved Diane Warren, who had written so many hits, like “If I Could Turn Back Time” for Cher and “I Get Weak” for Belinda Carlisle. She had originally written a song called “I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend” for Heart, and they brought it to me. But I didn’t want to sing like Heart. Like I said, I wasn’t in a cover band anymore. So I took it and lowered the key and had the zydeco player Rockin’ Dopsie play button accordion, and I made it into a Cajun march. Then I also got Baghiti Khumalo, the South African bass player who worked with Paul Simon, to play on that track, so it had a sort of New Orleans jazz-funeral sound. And Phil Ramone helped me produce that track (I think it’s a beautiful rendition, but apparently Diane later called up the record company and bitterly complained about it).

In the late eighties, the A & R guy was the genius, not the artist, and because the album wasn’t their creation, and because I wasn’t doing exactly what those knuckleheads wanted, it was wrong. Lennie and Eric Thorngren, the poor guy who was producing and arranging some of the tracks with me, kept looking at me and going, “Cyn, what’s wrong with you? You’re the Vinnie van Gogh of rock, do your thing, don’t listen to them, come on!” But I was so used to being a good soldier that I didn’t know when to say enough was enough (even now, that happens).

At one point some of the Sony executives even made a special trip from Japan to meet with me. They took me to dinner and said, “Cyndi, we believe in you, and we want you to make music again.” But nobody in New York said that to me. There was no communication. So I tried for a more commercial album and did 1989’s
A Night to Remember.
Which I call
A Night to Forget,
because it was one of those albums destined to be doomed because the record company was changing again. Then Lennie fell on his boat and broke his leg and was in the hospital. After that he left the company, which was devastating to me. So I had to deal with the new heads of state. I couldn’t please the new A & R guy. No matter what I played for him he said, “That’s nice ear candy.” Never “Oh, that’s a good song,” or “That’s catchy.” I’d be like, “Fuck you and your ear candy.” With all of them, I really felt like I wanted to say, “Get out of my face.” And the whole time I was breaking up with Dave.

I should have gotten out when that record executive asked, “What are you wearing?” He was in his own private Idaho. They wanted me to conform, and unfortunately they hired a nonconformist. You can’t get a chicken and turn it into a duck. The corporate world was standing on top of everything and that’s why the music went south. If you look at music in the early eighties, it was artist generated. So were the looks. The company didn’t say to Flock of Seagulls, “Why don’t you wear your hair like that?” That came from the band.

In the studio, I was stuck with this guy Lennie had hired who was a total alcoholic. It was so awful that even the musicians were looking at me going, “Cyn, this guy, he’s drinking at fuckin’ ten in the morning.” And I couldn’t get him to do anything because he had his own opinions. At one point he was talking about the sound of something, and he said, “It’s just a cunt-hair off.” Big surprise that I took real offense to that. I was like, “You know what? I’m paying you to collaborate with me, and I don’t want to be talked to like that.” And while I was trying to make the record, the promotion staff was
in the studio.
Imagine having the promotion staff in there telling you what to do while you’re trying to make music! The atmosphere got so bad that I had to stop production. I had heard about this event in Russia, a kind of writing summit between Russian and American songwriters, so I decided to go.

The Soviet Union in 1989 was a real different place from what Russia is now. I took bottled water with me, and toilet paper. I was also careful about sitting on the toilet because the toilet was one length and the toilet seat was another. And I felt like I was being spied on all the time, so I used to try to look good when I got into the tub at the American Hotel, where I stayed. Then I remember I lost something, jewelry maybe, and I couldn’t find it, so I said out loud, “Where is it? I know somebody took it. It was right here.” And then later, after the maids came in, it was back on my bed. That’s how I knew everything was bugged.

Russia was a strange place, because it was so hard to do what you loved to do. People just wanted to create, but at that point, it was against the law to make a video (and some of those musicians were dying to make videos). There were a lot of really fantastic underground bands.

Dave Wolff was still my manager so he came with me, even though we weren’t together anymore. But he didn’t come along when some
of us took a trip on the midnight train to Leningrad and I ended up sitting next to an Italian guy from Jersey. Laura Wills, my stylist and friend from Screaming Mimi’s, was with me, and she started calling him “French Fry,” so I called him that too, and the name stuck. We were all feeling pretty loose, because we were all artists and that’s the way artists are. Anyway, French Fry was so funny. He had pockmarks on his face, but he had touched them up on his passport. He kept making me laugh, and one thing led to another and we had a little affair. While I was doing that, everybody else was having their little flirtatious moments, too. (Diane Warren was on the trip, and even though I was mad at her because she badmouthed my version of “I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend,” I gotta say, she was funny and she was after the Secret Service guy. She thought he was cute.)