“Look at these guys,” Cyndi Lauper whispers discreetly as she nods toward a straitlaced couple strolling through the Sunset Marquis. “I wonder what they think of a rock ’n’ roll hotel.”
The 72-year-old pop icon is hanging out on a September afternoon in a leafy alcove at the clubby musician’s spot that’s been her go-to in Los Angeles since the early 1980s.
She’s seen a lot in her days here: That room over there is where she dyed the Bangles’ hair before they appeared as a band of pirates in the music video for her song “The Goonies ’R’ Good Enough”; over there by the pool is where she used to spy Roy Scheider “turning to a wilted prune,” she recalls, as he lay in the sun.
Back then, Lauper was a disruptive new star raising eyebrows with her chaotic fashion sense and her earthy Noo Yawk accent. Now, nearly half a century later, she’s just wrapped a two-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl to finish off what she’s calling her farewell tour.
Filled with quirky yet heartfelt classics like “Time After Time,” “She Bop” and the deathless “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” the Bowl shows were filmed for a CBS concert special, which didn’t stop one guy in the front row from falling asleep.
“They probably shoved him with beef and red wine,” Lauper says, less aggrieved than sympathetic. “I said, ‘Why don’t you just get a cot?’”
The gigs also came as Lauper is preparing to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony set for next month. In announcing that she’d been voted in, the hall hailed Lauper’s “distinctive four-octave voice and songwriting chops” and noted her influence on younger acts like Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Chappell Roan, whom she’d “empowered to perform as their unique, authentic selves.”
“She broke all the rules,” says Lauper’s friend Cher, who joined her onstage at the Bowl along with Joni Mitchell and SZA. “She even broke the accent rule.”
It’s all combining in a season of valediction for the eternal misfit whose life and career recently got the documentary treatment in “Let the Canary Sing” on Paramount+.
Except hold on: In just a couple of weeks, Lauper will premiere a new musical, “Working Girl,” at the La Jolla Playhouse — the long-awaited follow-up to her Broadway hit “Kinky Boots.” And the other day she revealed that, farewell tour barely behind her, she’ll head to Las Vegas next year for a limited residency at Caesars Palace to do it up “one last time” (or so she claims).
“We weren’t the fortunate ones and we weren’t the most beautiful ones,” Cher says. “Nothing said that either one of us were going to be famous. And yet we were. And yet we are. We’re still here — still working, still performing, still making records.”
Does Cher, who’s famously mounted one farewell tour after another, believe Lauper when she says she’s finished with the road?
“She’s tired now — I mean, of course she’s gonna say that,” Cher says. “She needs a rest. Every time you come off a tour, you’re dead. It’s not easy to get up there in the high heels and run around and sing.
“But if she can do it, it’s not the last one. If you’re a performer, you want to perform — it’s just that simple.”
Lauper knew she was an artist basically from the get-go.
After a turbulent childhood in Queens in which her mother’s devotion was offset by the abuse of her stepfather, Lauper left home at 17, she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “with a toothbrush, a change of underwear, an apple and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book ‘Grapefruit.’”
She worked at IHOP and as a terribly ineffective office assistant — “a gal Friday the 13th,” as she puts it — and sang in a series of low-paid cover bands; she formed a new wave group called Blue Angel that almost made it before flaming out amid a legal dispute with the band’s manager.
In 1981, she met a guy named Dave Wolff at a party with “big blue eyes and long hair like Jesus,” she says at the Marquis. “Not that Jesus really had blue eyes. He probably looked very Iranian, right? But you know the Catholics — they had to gentrify him.”
Lauper’s wearing a black mesh top, her silver-blue hair in a spiky ‘do; she’s got a boxy handbag with a ’50s-throwback design by her side and a giant pink hat she says she’ll put on if it gets too sunny. “My father, he had skin cancer, so I gotta be careful,” she notes.
“Anyway,” she adds — there’s a word you’re likely to hear a dozen or more times chatting with Lauper — she and Wolff got together romantically as girlfriend and boyfriend then professionally as client and manager. He helped her land a record deal as a solo act; she remade Robert Hazard’s somewhat pouty “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” — as opposed to getting serious with a guy, the original laments — as a kind of exuberant liberation cry.
Lauper will inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony in Los Angeles on Nov. 8.
(Larsen & Talbert / For The Times)
“It’s saying: Don’t judge us by old patterns,” Cher says. “It’s a very feminist song. I hate to go into that old chestnut, but it’s like, we want to go out and be loud and proud and jump around and have a good time. Boys have been having fun for a long time, so that’s what we want. We want to be free — to do what we want to do and not be judged.”
Propelled by a colorful music video starring Lauper’s mother and the professional wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” became a signature hit of the early MTV era, peaking at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 behind — well, does Lauper remember? She shakes her head. Van Halen’s “Jump,” I tell her.
“God, that was a good record,” she says. “Great musicians. And David Lee Roth killed me. What’d he always say? ‘Doesn’t matter if you win or lose — it’s what you wear.’ I was like, ‘I’m with you.’”
Beyond “Girls,” Lauper’s 1983 debut, “She’s So Unusual,” spun off the punky “Money Changes Everything” and the wistful “Time After Time”; the LP, which went platinum seven times over, garnered six nominations at the 27th Grammy Awards, where Lauper was accompanied to the stage by Hulk Hogan as she picked up the trophy for best new artist.
Thinking back on that night, what Lauper says she remembers is the disappointed expressions on the faces of executives from her record label, who’d watched with delight the year before as Michael Jackson picked up eight Grammys with “Thriller.”
Even so, she says she’s glad she lost record of the year and song of the year to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which cemented Turner’s arrival as a solo superstar following the end of her abusive marriage to Ike Turner.
“I come from two generations of domestic violence in the home — my mom and my grandmother,” Lauper says. “So when I had to be against Tina, that was a hard one for me. She doesn’t win after going through everything she went through? I’d have been really upset if I’d won instead of her.”
For Lauper, the real testament to her achievement with “Time After Time” is the dozens of covers of the song that have been performed since she wrote it. Does she have a favorite?
“Miles,” she says, referring to Miles Davis’ instrumental rendition. “And Patti LaBelle. The time I saw Patti sing it right in front of me” — this was on LaBelle’s 1985 TV special, on which the two did a fiery duet — “I felt like, OK, I can drop the mic right now. That’s it.”
Lauper, of course, didn’t drop the mic.
In 1985 she took part in “We Are the World,” arguably stealing the show from the likes of Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen; that same year she sang the “Goonies” theme song, which today she swears would’ve been bigger if the movie studio hadn’t insisted on putting the movie’s name in the song’s title.
“DJs didn’t want to say that on the radio,” she says. “And what happened? They didn’t play it. But now it’s a cult classic,” she adds — one she played right at the top of her set at the Bowl.
Lauper followed her smash debut in 1986 with “True Colors,” the title track of which she framed as a tribute to a friend who’d died from AIDS.
“She didn’t record it because it sounded like a hit,” says Billy Steinberg, who co-wrote the stark, slow-moving ballad with Tom Kelly. Yet “True Colors” became a hit anyway, topping the Hot 100 for two weeks thanks in large part to Lauper’s deeply unguarded vocal performance.
Says Steinberg: “She just sings it with so much empathy and warmth.”
Indeed, “True Colors” heralded Lauper’s decades of work as an activist fighting homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth and combating efforts to restrict women’s reproductive rights.
“I’m very political,” she says. “Always was.”
In 1993, she and Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote the haunting “Sally’s Pigeons” about a childhood friend of Lauper’s who died as a teenager after getting a back-alley abortion. I tell her I was surprised that the song, which didn’t chart in the U.S., made the setlist for her farewell tour.
“You think I’m gonna leave out something that might make people understand what it was like at a point when women were dying all the time?” she asks. “Leave it out to put some bulls— in there that doesn’t mean anything?”
For all her passion about what she sees as institutional injustice, Lauper takes a generous view of individuals whose politics diverge from hers. She hadn’t seen Hogan, who became an avowed supporter of President Trump before his death this year, in “a long, long time,” she notes. “But how people evolve — the twists and turns in their decision-making — that’s up to them.”
She voices a similar thought regarding Rick Derringer, who played guitar with her on the LaBelle show and who also embraced Trump before he died this year.
“You know, people fall into this, they fall into that,” she says. “They say there’s staunch right and staunch wrong. But then there’s the gray area, which everybody lives in.
“God, I feel like Mr. Peabody from ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle,’” she adds with a laugh. “Remember him, where he’d have his little corner and tell you how history was?”
She’s somewhat less conciliatory regarding Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone magazine founder who was booted from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023 after he made comments in a New York Times interview about a lack of intellectual ambition among female musicians and artists of color.
“To speak like a moron and be that educated,” she says, shaking her head. “I wish I could’ve been educated like that. He went to college, he could read and write. I got to college and realized, ‘Oh, s—, I can’t even read these books.’”
Still, she has no qualms about accepting the invitation of the Rock Hall, which in the last few years has significantly diversified its ranks and its leadership along race and gender lines.
“If you don’t let people evolve, you’re not gonna learn anything,” she says.
Cher, who was inducted into the Rock Hall last year after much criticism of the organization, says she told Wenner’s regime she didn’t want to be inducted. “But the new people, I have a lot of hope for them,” she says.
As far as Lauper’s induction, Cher says it’s long overdue, not least “because people who’ve been doing it for five minutes have been getting in.”
Yet Lauper sees a certain cosmic resonance in the timing.
She recalls the first gig she ever played as a lead singer (after earlier singing backup) at a club in the Hamptons called the Boardy Barn sometime in the mid-’70s.
“Five thousand kids, nickel beers, everybody’s wasted and the first song I sing is by Bad Company,” she says, referring to the English rock group set to be welcomed along with Lauper in a ceremony on Nov. 8 at L.A.’s Peacock Theater.
“When things like that happen, you have to look at it and understand that there are no accidents.”
Lauper’s manager pops by to remind the singer that she has an appointment to tour a house in La Jolla via FaceTime. She’ll be down there for two months as she puts the finishing touches on “Working Girl,” which means she needs somewhere to live that can accommodate her portable recording studio.
Lauper got into acting in the late ’80s when her music career temporarily cooled; little-seen films like “Vibes” and “Off and Running” didn’t exactly turn her into a movie star, though she met her husband, actor David Thornton, on the set of the latter.
“I realized, ‘Hey, this guy’s really cute and funny and sweet,’ and so we started seeing each other,” she says. “I didn’t know if it was just gonna be a movie thing because people in this business, they’re weird, right?” Lauper and Thornton married in 1991 and had a son, Declyn, in 1997.
“He’s not a rocker,” she says of her husband. Last night, Lauper got a new tattoo of a seahorse on her arm. “I’m gonna try and wear a shirt so he doesn’t actually see it for a while. He’s such a WASP. When I met him, he looked Italian, but the poor bastard has relatives that go back to the Mayflower.”
In 2006, after she released an album of pop and jazz standards, Lauper appeared in “The Threepenny Opera” on Broadway; seven years later, “Kinky Boots” — about a drag queen who saves a struggling shoe factory — won six Tony Awards including best musical and best original score. (Lauper was the first woman to take the score prize by herself.)
Lauper’s new musical “Working Girl” is based on director Mike Nichols’ 1988 film by the same title.
(Larsen & Talbert / For The Times)
Set to begin previews on Oct. 28, “Working Girl” has been in development since at least 2017. “It’ll go this way, get a little pear-shaped, then it’ll come back this way,” Lauper says of the show, which is based on Mike Nichols’ 1988 movie about a secretary navigating the male-dominated business world. The music pulls from the ’80s sounds Lauper knows as well as anyone; to help her out, she brought in Rob Hyman, with whom she wrote “Time After Time,” and Cheryl James of the rap group Salt-N-Pepa, which will also be inducted into the Rock Hall next month.
According to Lauper, her agent wanted her to audition for the lead part Melanie Griffith played in the film. “But I said, ‘I can’t work in an office — I can’t even pretend,’” Lauper recalls. “‘I worked in an office and it was so awful I’d be traumatized.’”
As she’s talking about the musical, a guy comes by us at the hotel and stops to tell Lauper how much he enjoyed her concert at the Bowl. She thanks him and watches as he walks away.
“Now let’s hope that he’s inspired enough to stand up for himself,” she says.
That’s what her show is for, in her mind?
“Did you go to the same show? What f—ing show did you go to? Lemme tell you something: I had Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, the League of Women Voters — that was our little village. I had information for people to help themselves if they need help, and I had information about the SAVE Act that they’re trying to put over on the American women so that if you got married and you have your husband’s name and it’s not the same name on your birth certificate, you can’t vote.” (Supporters of the legislation, which would require people to prove they’re U.S. citizens in order to vote, say that a birth certificate is just one form of eligible identification.)
“We’re not going back to that s—,” Lauper continues. “So of course that’s why I went out this summer — to wake people up. Everything you do, don’t you want it to have the highest purpose? Don’t you want it to be something worth all the heartache and sacrifice?
“I’m not interested in just making money. I got a lot of money. And how much money do you need, really? What am I gonna do, buy an island?”
She probably could, right?
“Ehh, not really,” she says. “Too expensive.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
