Cyndi Lauper: ‘I want to say goodbye big, you know?’

She survived convent school, a violent stepfather and being raped by a band-mate. Now as the singer heads off on her farewell tour aged 71, she just wants to have fun.

The difference between doing a world tour when you’re 31 and when you’re 71, says Cyndi Lauper, is five hours a day. Back when she was in her thirties her voice could effortlessly scale four octaves and blow the socks off people in the back row: “I was a
killer singer. Drop a dime and I would sing,” she says in her girlish voice with its almost parodic Brooklyn accent (“killah singah”). But now in her seventies and midway through her global farewell tour, she has to spend five hours every day doing vocal and physical exercises, “just so that I can go out and sing like a fire-breathing dragon”.

Lauper has spent her whole life fighting to get her fiery voice out. Back in the early days music executives wanted to pitch her as the next Debbie Harry, or any other already famous female singer, but she said, “You already got one of those! I’m Cyndi Lauper.” (“Laow-puh”.) When someone suggested she sing a song from 1979 called Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which was written from a male perspective about how women are obsessed with sex, Lauper rewrote it as a joyful feminist anthem. And when a member of her band raped her in the early 1980s, she refused to give them the satisfaction of quitting. “They wanted the power my voice had. They weren’t going to get it,” she says fiercely.

They didn’t. Over the course of her 40-year career she has used her voice to sell more than 50 million records, and she has been garlanded with two Grammys and a Tony, the latter for her score for the musical Kinky Boots.

Lauper and I are meeting upstairs in a Russian restaurant in New York City, not far from her apartment on the Upper West Side. It’s a conservative neighbourhood where I imagine Lauper – with her pink hair, kabuki pale face and very Lauperesque fashion choices – stands out: “No, I blend! I just put on a hat and don’t open my mouth,” she replies with a cackle. Today she is dressed in the relatively sober outfit of black trousers, a white and black blouse and black waistcoat, all topped with the pink hair and some red lipstick. “I always think with a little red lipstick you don’t even have to put on a lot of other make-up. But when I wore it in 1988 they wouldn’t let me in the hotel because they thought I was a whore. Do you want to order the brown bread and butter caviar?” (“Buttah”.)

We have to order quickly as Lauper’s pretour diet stipulates that she has to stop eating bang on 6pm, although she looks perfectly slim to me. “I’m a little fat for what I do,” she says. “You see how thin everybody is now and the clothes aren’t made for big girls. I don’t want to wear a girdle and be squeezed like a sausage when I sing, and I won’t do the Ozempic thing. Do you think we have time to order some borscht?”

We are meeting two weeks before President Trump’s inauguration. In one of those improbable meetings of minds that happen in the modern celebrity world, Lauper met Trump during filming of The Celebrity Apprentice in 2009, when she was a guest on the show he hosted. In her 2012 memoir she describes him as “nice” and his children as “good and hardworking”.

Given his opposition to LGBT rights and abortion – causes very close to Lauper’s heart – how does she feel about him now? She scowls. “Look, it’s good to be king. It’s what he likes, apparently. But I don’t want to talk about him, I want to talk about the tour and how my music will bring people together and make them happy.”

Why is she doing a farewell tour now? Other musicians carry on well into their eighties. “I want to say goodbye big, you know? There is an art to standing still and singing, and I do not have that talent. I go…” – and she waves her arms, as if she’s about to take off – “so I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to do the kind of performance that I feel is right.” And when a performance doesn’t go well it crushes her. Memories of her appearance at Glastonbury last summer – when her set was blighted by sound problems – make her sigh sadly. “I couldn’t hear the band and that sucked. I wanted to be really great.”

Greatness has always been Lauper’s goal, despite – or because of – the frankly gothic levels of trauma she has survived. Our interview was supposed to last only an hour, but her story is so extraordinary it drifts on almost three times as long as she describes how she kept on, as she puts it, “climbing that mountain”.

Lauper grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. She has an older sister, Ellen, and a younger brother, Fred, and their parents divorced when they were all still young. Shortly after that Lauper was thrown out of school. “I was nine and had a political difference with the teacher there,” she says. “He told me my mother was going to hell because she was divorced. I said, ‘My mother’s not going to hell, you don’t even know my mother!’ So they called her up and said they didn’t think I belonged in the school because of her lifestyle.” Lauper’s mother, a Catholic Italian-American, sent her daughter to a convent school, which went even less well: “I lasted six months because I asked the nuns if they menstruated.”

Twenty years later, on Lauper’s first Italian tour in 1983, she announced to the nation’s press: “The three biggest oppressors of women are the family, the church, the government.” What did the Italians make of her? “They thought I was crazy.”

After the divorce her mother remarried. Lauper writes in her memoir that her stepfather was violent, and when he and her mother fought he would threaten to rape Cyndi and Ellen, who were listening in their bedroom upstairs. In the book she refers to him as a paedophile. “I am an incest survivor,” she says. “There were three father figures who abused me. One was my stepfather, who was violent with my mother, and the others I can’t really talk about because people are still alive.” In her memoir she also describes her grandfather as a paedophile and writes that her stepfather would “touch himself right outside our bathroom window”. “It’s not like I’m alone – this happens to a lot of girls,” she says.

Lauper went on in her memoir to describe how she caught her stepfather watching her through the keyhole while she was in the bathtub. That was that for her. She grabbed her toothbrush, a change of underwear, an apple and a copy of Yoko Ono’s 1964 conceptual art book Grapefruit and left home.

She went to the city and moved in with her sister Ellen, who was already out as a lesbian. “You have to remember, this was the 1970s and it was a frightening time [to be gay], and Ellen moved away from us because she was scared [of the family’s reaction]. But I said to her, ‘You can’t ditch me, I’m your sister!’” (“Sis-tuh!”) Years later, Lauper’s interpretation of the song True Colors, which was inspired by a friend of hers and Ellen’s who died of Aids in the 1980s, became a gay anthem. Having Ellen as a sister, Lauper says, woke her up to gay rights, just as much as seeing her mother’s struggles made her a feminist: “I watched women like my mother be shut down: no education, no chance of anything but to be a dutiful wife and mother, cleaning, cooking, supporting everyone but yourself. My mother had a beautiful singing voice, it made you cry. Ah, woulda coulda shoulda, right?” Years later Lauper put her mother in several of her music videos, including Girls Just Want to Have Fun, showing her enjoying her daughter’s success.

Lauper had been singing since she was a child, performing songs from South Pacific for her neighbours when she was only four; they would give her quarters. So when she left home she sang at nightclubs on Long Island with a covers band. One night, while hanging out with the band in an apartment, one of them raped her while two women held her down.

“I wasn’t strong enough to protect myself,” she says.

It was not your fault, I say.

“I know. But I should have been. I didn’t realise you gotta take karate, you know?”

Afterwards Lauper asked one of the women why she had held her down while the man – the woman’s boyfriend – attacked her. “I love him and want to make him happy,” she replied. When Lauper later told the other band members what had happened they didn’t believe her. “But I refused to quit because I didn’t want to give him that power. So eventually they fired me – can you believe it?” she says with a bark of laughter.

In 1989 Lauper encountered the man who raped her. He approached her and gushed over her success. She thought about saying something but decided not to. The karma, she decided, was enough.

Lauper slogged it out for years, getting whatever singing jobs she could while working as a waitress and, for a while, in Screaming Mimis, a famous New York City vintage store, where she always bought the best clothes for herself. She took a former manager to court because they tried to retain control over her music; the judge sided with Lauper, decreeing, “Let the canary sing,” which became the title of her 2023 documentary.

By the time her first album, She’s So Unusual, was released in 1983, she was 30 years old, and her timing was both good and bad. Good in that MTV was just taking off and her gleeful, defiantly pro-women video for Girls Just Want to Have Fun – which has since had more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube – was perfect for the channel. Bad because another smart-talking, working-class, Catholic-raised pop star was waiting in the wings. That same year Madonna released her debut album featuring Borderline and Lucky Star, and she and Lauper were ever after compared by the press and set up as rivals.

“Madonna is a totally different animal, totally different. Smart as a whip. Really great entertainer. But she would take what everyone was doing and then kind of make it hers, and then when you’d come out with yours people would say, ‘Are you trying to be Madonna?’ And you’d be, like, ‘What?’ ” She shrugs.

And yet, despite Madonna’s already growing shadow, She’s So Unusual was a massive success. It was so packed with hit songs that four of them got into the US pop charts in the top five, a first for a debut album by a woman: Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time, All Through the Night and She Bop, Lauper’s paean to female masturbation.

Lauper giggles at one point when she sings that song on the album. Why?

“Well, I was in the studio by myself so I took off my shirt and tickled myself.”

It’s wonderful that, despite having been so violated, you were still able to enjoy your body and not feel disconnected from it, I say.

“I didn’t feel that until I was 40 and a close friend died. Then I was, like, oh. But it’s OK.’

Aside from Boy George (“I love him”) and the soul singer Patti LaBelle, Lauper says she didn’t have many friends in the industry. “I was never hanging out with people because I was always working. You work, you rest, and then you wake up and work again. I never had time to drink and party – I was always in a back room somewhere doing my vocal exercises.”

So she never got into 1980s pop music excess? She looks at me like I’m crazy. “I couldn’t! I wouldn’t be able to sing!”

In 1986 Lauper released her True Colors album, followed in 1989 by A Night to Remember, which included her lush take on the Roy Orbison song I Drove All Night. But sales were starting to falter. Matters weren’t helped by Lauper’s sometimes antagonistic relationship with record company executives. “I was fighting all the time. But you don’t need to fight. It took me a while to understand that if someone suggests something you don’t want to do, you can just say, ‘That’s very interesting.’ ”

What did she say before she learnt that? “When I get a f***ing lobotomy, I’ll do that.”

The music business in the 1980s was run by “male chauvinistic assholes”, she says, the kind who would come up to her and smell her hair (“I’m, like, ‘F*** you, asshole’ ”) and insisted on seeing her as a bubblegum pop star, rather than the artist she knew herself to be.

“It was very, very sexist then.” Is it better now? “F*** no!”

Another problem for her career was that Lauper loved to sing music of all genres: jazz, blues, pop, dance, anything. And this confused an industry that then preferred artists to stay in one genre. “People see everything in black and white. But I know there’s a grey area. I live my life there.” Decades later she was vindicated: her 2010 album, Memphis Blues, spent 13 weeks at No 1 in the US blues chart.

Lauper also likes to act, especially comedy, which she sees as having a rhythm like music. She won an Emmy for her appearance on the 1990s US sitcom Mad About You, and there were other benefits to acting too. On the set of the 1991 film Off and Running she met a handsome young actor named David Thornton, who played a murderer in the film, while she played a mermaid (the film was very much not a hit). They flirted and one night he kissed her in the elevator. When she got to her room she called him in his room and said, “You wanna finish what you started?” This year they’ll celebrate their 34th anniversary. “So I guess it wasn’t a movie set fling. He has such a good soul,” she says, smiling.

Lauper was 44 when she had their son, Declyn. Last year Declyn, 27, appeared in court where he pleaded not guilty to gun possession charges, following a shooting incident in Harlem. In 2022 he was arrested behind the wheel of a stolen car. Lauper looks tired and sad at the mention of her son. “Everybody’s OK. I’m gonna – I don’t want to talk about my son if that’s OK.” On social media Declyn often makes reference to music. “He wants to be a musician, but I don’t know what he really wants to be. He’s very talented. He could do a lot of things. He’s a natural actor, but you know ”

Lauper tried to shield Declyn from her fame when he was little. “I didn’t want to sign autographs when I was with him because he felt people took me away from him. And when I was with him I wanted to be with him.”

It must be hard for children of high-profile people to feel as though they have to share their parents, I say. She’s quiet for a while before answering. “I know. And not only that, but people judge you. They think this and they think that. ‘Why aren’t you living in a mansion?’ ‘Why don’t you do this?’ You know, I felt bad [for Declyn] that he wasn’t Madonna’s kid because Madonna was very successful. I don’t know.”

Lauper has spent decades involved in activism, and has launched two non-profits: True Colors United in 2008, to address the problem of homeless LGBT youth, and Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights in 2022, to fundraise for women’s reproductive healthcare. She also continues to make music, and in 2013 won the best original score Tony for Kinky Boots. She has written a stage musical version of the film Working Girl, which will start touring the US in the autumn.

“You know they wanted me in the 1980s to act in the movie, right?” she says.

To play Melanie Griffith’s part?

“Yeah. But I didn’t want to do it, because the thought of being in an office, even a fake one, would give me a nervous breakdown.”

Griffith did sound a lot like Lauper in that film. “It was weird,” she says. “We’d meet at a party and she’d start talking to me just to hear me talk,” Lauper says, sounding unmistakably like Griffith in the movie, or maybe vice versa.

Lauper might be done touring but she is “definitely not” retiring. That incessant drive to keep going will never fade. “People ask me, ‘How do you feel?’ But I don’t know. I just get up and do it, because I have to.”

Written by: Hadley Freeman

© The Times of London