Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (26 page)

I was worn out from touring, when I got an offer to do another movie. I had gotten a couple of other offers before then—for
Steel Magnolias
and
Working Girl.
No one explained to me that it would be a good idea to work with Mike Nichols but I didn’t want to do
Working Girl
because I couldn’t stand to be in an office again, and I didn’t want to play a beautician again. Then I turned down
Steel Magnolias
because I didn’t think I’d be good enough.

But I decided to take the role in
Paradise Paved,
which was then changed to
Moon over Miami
—which was then changed to
Off and Running.
But it never really got off and running. It was the last film Orion Pictures made before it filed for bankruptcy in 1991. Here’s the thing: Whenever a project has three names, you know it’s not going to work. But I thought, “Let’s stop with the music for a while and do a movie.” It was another crazy-girl story, a quirky film that tried to be serious, too.
Vibes
had a better premise. I played an actress named Cyd Morse who wasn’t getting much work so I danced as an underwater mermaid at a Miami night club. Then I got caught up in a murder mystery after two guys killed my boyfriend and tried to kill me too. It was supposed to be like a dark screwball-comedy thing. But it was another sexist set, and in my opinion, I felt the director was overwhelmed. And after a while I felt like I was in a boys’ club. And once again, I never felt like I could talk to anyone except my acting coach.

My new acting coach was into the whole “Method acting” thing, which I could never grasp. She gave me all these exercises, like jumping up and down on one foot while singing “Happy Birthday” out of
time. I felt tortured during that. I’m a singer/musician. Repetitively saying words over and over again in a scene helped me find the rhythm of it. For me, everything is rhythm. We have a heart, we have a pulse, we have brain waves. We are rhythm. Once I hear the rhythm of a person’s speech, then I learn the person who is behind it. That’s what I understood. The other stuff I didn’t get. I always was trying to figure out what the scene was about, but I didn’t know how, and I couldn’t understand what they were telling me. I was told not to behave like myself. They would say, “You’ll need to talk lower, and don’t use your hands when you talk.” So I tried my best, but the “why” was missing. I was just desperately trying to please everybody after being dragged over the coals in
Vibes.

Louis Falco, the movie’s choreographer, became a good friend. He had a dance company in New York and I went to see him when he was choreographing the underwater scenes. He said, “Cyn, you have to undulate.” Undulate? What the hell is that? Then he saw me trying to undulate and said, “Uh, never mind, that’s okay.” Then when we actually did it in the water, he told me to twirl around, and I twirled around and twirled around like a drill, until I hit my head on the wall of the pool. Again, he said, “Uh, never mind.” I also had to learn how to swim. I don’t like to get my face wet so it was kind of difficult. Then I had to learn how to scuba dive. Sometimes I would freak out, and the swimming teacher would say, “If you freak out, rest, become really calm, remember that you can breathe, and think, ‘What am I afraid of?’” I still use that now when I freak out—as long as I can breathe, I can remain calm.

The costume designer liked the whiteness of my skin and wanted me to have black hair in the pool to make me look different from the other mermaids. Then they decided I’d have a black top too. But the black top did something strange to the underwater visual: It sucked
all the light in. All the other mermaids had on light-colored tops that made their breasts look even bigger than they were—not that they weren’t built like brick shit houses in the first place. But my black top made my breasts look smaller, so that I looked like a twelve-year-old. Just before I went into the water, the guy who worked for the producer came running over to me and started yelling about the costume. I said to him, “Why are you yelling at me? Is this the first time you looked at my costume? Why didn’t you check it before? I’m petrified of the water, and now that I’m about to get in, you’re stressing me out?” Everybody was freaked out because by the time I got to the end of the conversation, I was yelling.

After I went into the water a bunch of times, I realized that not only could I work the air pipe and breathe by filtering the water with my tongue, but I could also lip-sync. All of a sudden, I was performing underwater. Not for nothing, but I was like Flipper. Who knew you could lip-sync underwater? That was fun. At first, they had a stuntwoman doing some of the underwater shots but the director felt I had more personality. The frustrating thing was that after all that work learning how to do this, they only filmed a little bit of the song. They didn’t even do one complete take. If they filmed the whole song, even just once, then we could have created a video with clips of the movie in it. Which I thought might have been why I was cast, so that they could have cross-promotion in two different worlds, music and film.

While I was shooting that movie, I found out I was nominated for another Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance in “I Drove All Night.” The funny thing was, when we were compiling that CD, I told Don Grierson “I Drove All Night” should be the first cut on the album, because this song would be nominated for a Grammy. I remember how he looked at me like I was a bit delusional. But this time, I was going against Bonnie Raitt’s comeback and she won for
“Nick of Time.” (Like I said, the first time I was nominated for best vocal, I lost to Tina Turner’s comeback. The second time, with “True Colors,” I lost to Barbra Streisand’s comeback. The problem with me is that I either keep coming back or I don’t go away . . . I’m not sure which one it is.)

The producer of the film would not allow me to take a day off to go to the Grammys. It was just a really difficult time. I felt really beaten down. But then my assistant, Paul, who was on the set with me, kept saying, “You gotta meet this guy David Thornton—he plays the murderer. He’s really funny. I can’t tell if he’s straight or gay but God, is he cute.”

D
AVID, DAVID, DAVID:
that was all Paul kept talking about, because he had a crush on him. (“If he’s gay, then he’s my new boyfriend,” he said.) Then he did some investigating and found out that David had a girlfriend, but he didn’t get a vibe that things were goin’ good. So when we were going to dinner one night and
Off and Running
did not supply any transportation for David, I said, “Maybe we should call the murderer and see if he wants to come with us.”

During filming, I didn’t want to stay in the fancy hotel in Miami Beach with my costar David Keith and the director. The room was on the water, but it didn’t even have a view. So I asked if I could stay at the nearby Eden Roc, where I could have a nice, big penthouse with a patio and a beautiful view for less than the cost of the room they got me, and they said yes. The only problem was that sometimes I found palmetto bugs in my room. Ya ever seen a palmetto bug? Their faces are so big, you could still see the expressions on them when they keeled over. (I said that once in the elevator, and the manager was there too and he got mad because I said it in front of some guests.)

When David Thornton came up to meet me, he did a really silly thing. He pulled his pants all the way up like Urkel and shook my
hand with rounded shoulders and said, “Nice to meet you.” So I knew he was funny. We started hanging out in a little group with Paul and Louis and Marilyn, my acting coach, and I really loved our times off the set together. David is this fuckin’ sensational actor (he went to the Yale School of Drama), very creative, and also very sweet.

When we all did our first script reading together, we went through a scene where my boyfriend lets this room-service guy (who was played by David) into our room and he karate-kicks my boyfriend out the window and kills him. After the reading, I called up David’s room and said, “Listen, pal, not for nothin’, but don’t you be kickin’ my boyfriend like that. I’m going to tell him not to answer the door.” And I hung up. After that, he started to send notes to Paul that were supposedly from Madonna, telling him that he should go work for her instead because he wouldn’t have to taste her food like he had to do with me. He wrote all this funny stuff, and then it was on. One time I was out with Marilyn and I took all the shrimp tails from my dish and stapled them to the bottom of a piece of paper. We got into it and we were both laughing. Then I cut out letters from the newspaper and glued them to spell out, “Dear murderer, please don’t kill me—from the mermaid.” Then I put that by his door.

Back and forth, back and forth went these practical jokes, which were so hilariously funny. Then I found another crazy letter in my dressing room—only this one wasn’t so crazy. It was written just before the first day of shooting, and it said that I had all the beauty and knowledge within me to do this. How generous was David to say that to me? Louis was reading it, and he turned around and said, “Cyn, you know what this is?” I said, “Yeah, it’s a card.” He goes, “No. It’s a love letter.”

I was the one who made the director hire him in the first place. I sat in on all the auditions because I was supposed to be involved; we were all going to be a team. We saw all these guys who wanted to play
the murderer, and then this one guy came in who was so intense that he scared the script reader so much that she just dropped the paper. I looked at him and thought, “Yeah, he’s a little good-lookin’, but isn’t that what makes a murderer really menacing?” His energy just filled the stage. I looked at the director and said, “You know, it’s that guy, what’s-his-name.” The director pulled out his headshot and said, “No, he’s too good-looking.” I said, “Listen, you can always make a person look ugly. But you can’t make an ugly guy act good, the way this guy can. It gives the story weight.”

Unfortunately, David Keith, who was to play the lead male role, was going through a rough time in his life, I think. He just didn’t seem to be himself, because before I worked with him, I met a musician who knew him who said he was nice. But he wasn’t so nice during filming. Like, I’d be soaking wet after a scene and he’d take the portable air-conditioning unit and put it right by me. And I found it abusive that he made the kid in the movie cry. The kid was really a great little actor, and instead of continuing to act after that movie, I think he went to military school and then into the army.

This was my second film and it had the same strange atmosphere as my first one. I could never seem to get away with an easy set. And I never found a way to shut out the people who were trying to distract me on purpose. It’s like, where are the fuckin’ rules of etiquette on a film set? I did that movie to get away from the tumultuous changing of the guard at the record company and all those corporate heads who wanted to put their stamp on me and wanted to be the celebrities instead of the artists being the celebrities.

So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to go to Miami, and I’m going to live these pages for the next few months. I’m not Cyn anymore, I’m Cyd. I’m not a blonde anymore. I’m going to do something different.” And when the director told me to dye my hair black like Louise
Brooks, I jumped. But when the producer saw it, he flipped out, so I put an orange glaze over it so it would seem dark brown.

Then I started filming and realized what a pain in the ass it was to be with those people. The movie actually had a good script, but like I said, I felt the director was overwhelmed. He’d yell on set, and then if we looked upset he’d go, “Come on, everyone, this is a comedy! What’s wrong?” He reminded me of actor Eugene Levy in one of those old
Second City Television
skits. I’d think, “This can’t really be my life, can it? Is it always gonna be a comedy of errors?”

At least I had fun with my friends, and with David. He taught me how to shut out the idiots around me by listening to music on my headphones that was connected to the scene I was about to do. After a while a few mermaids started to pounce on David like cats on a mouse. And one day he told me about a girl who was a model, who gave him a lift to town because she was going to her exercise class. He said she changed into her workout clothes while she was driving. She must have let go of the wheel once in a while, too, which, considering he was in the passenger seat (or what they call the “death seat”), must have been quite a ride. He would stand behind me when that model came around, and he’d say, “Oh, no, here she comes again, that’s the one that took her clothes off in the car. Come on, just do me a favor, please just pretend you’re talking to me.” I was like, “Okay, okay, I’ll talk to you.”

After I watched all these girls hitting on David, I thought, “You know what? I’m Cyndi Lauper, goddamn it! If somebody’s going to get this guy, why can’t it be me? So what if I look like a twelve-year-old under the water with my black top on? That’s just the light. Let me shine a light on
this
!” So I put on this cute sleeveless tunic that I wore for a TV appearance once in Madrid—it was vintage, orange with a green paisley print on silk with yellow trim, with a little bodice. I
zipped up the back zipper, looked in the mirror, and told myself: “I’m Gumby, damn it!” I fixed my hair, put my lipstick on, put on my clear Frederick’s of Hollywood pumps, and went out the door.

All of us crammed into the car to go to a restaurant, and of course we couldn’t all fit, so we had to sit on each other’s laps. All of a sudden I started feeling something on the back of my calf and I was like, “What the—?” Then I realized it was David’s hand, and I thought, “Why, you sly devil.”

We had dinner and then walked on the beach. The moon was full that night. The moon always seemed like some big ol’ lantern hanging over the waves that washed up on South Beach. David and I were standing in the surf. It was really windy and I had my arms out, and the wind was blowing against my dress. I stood at the edge of the water, lifted my arms straight out at my sides, and said, “I wish I was a kite.” He asked me why, and I said, “Because then I could fly. But it wouldn’t be so good, because somebody would always be pulling my string.” So he looked at me, and looked out at the water, and said, “Why not be a wave?” And all of a sudden I stared at him and thought, “How many times have I talked to people who don’t even hear me? Here’s a fellow who not only heard me but was able to answer me back in a poetic way.”